once & done: destiel one shots

Pink (college/laundromat AU)

Written for the DSB's "missed connections" challenge. College AU that takes place in Lawrence, Kansas. Features Dean/Cas, Sam, Charlie, Benny with mentions of Bobby, Ash, John, and Mary Winchester. No warnings.

Prompt: Write a missed connections personal ad, a reply to the ad, and a story. With the exception of the one written for this fic, the missed connections are taken from the real Lawrence craigslist.

Summary: The panties were pink.

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The panties were pink.

Castiel plucked them from the dryer between his index finger and thumb, and dropped them on a yellow folding table. A shame-they were a nice pair, judging by the amount of women's underwear he'd folded growing up, helping with the family laundry. His mother tended toward comfort, preferring cotton with sensible coverage, but Anna had experimented with undergarments that could be more accurately described as strings.

These were somewhere in-between, with enough fabric to hide the necessary bits, and enough lace to make them alluring, made from a richly saturated fabric that had just a hint of shine-not satin, but satin-y, certainly. They were expensive, was more to the point.

It wasn't a garment that should ever find its way into a commercial washing machine, let alone a dryer. He knew enough from overhearing his mother's lectures that good lingerie should be hand washed.

He glanced right and left, wondering if the owner was still present, but the only people in Lawrence Laundromat were a young woman reading a newspaper in the seating area who had just started her wash cycle, and a man about Castiel's age with his head bent over a basket of laundry he was diligently folding. Not wanting to speculate, he left them on the table and transferred his clothes from the washer into the dryer, depositing a dollar for twenty-four minutes of drying time. It would remove most of the water, and he'd hang them to finish drying when he returned to his apartment. He was too tired to sit here for another hour.

He settled in across from the woman in a beige chair and took out his phone, connecting to the free wifi and checking his email to stay awake. It contained two messages from Meg about their apiculture project for environmental science, and a video forward from his mother. He deleted it without watching, skimmed Meg's emails but didn't write back, and opened Facebook.

Charlie was still awake, despite it being three in the morning-bless twenty-four hour laundromats that provided him an excuse to avoid campus antics-and had posted a picture of herself at the brewing company taken earlier that evening, arm slung around a pretty brunette.

"In a relationship with Dorothy Gale," her status read, which made Castiel frown. He closed the app without liking the status and upbraided himself for sulking.

His single status was by choice. People asked him out, but he never accepted, the exception being his fling with Hannah during freshman year that had confirmed his status as a firm six on the Kinsey scale. That led to a month of denial and one-and-a-half years of self loathing, which had morphed to acceptance now that he was in his junior year. But dating was stressful-having to gauge a person's interest, whether it was physical or emotional or both. He derived enough satisfaction from his studies and got enough social interaction from his small group of friends to be content, but sometimes it was nice to think about being with someone.

He allowed his gaze to travel across the room, to the man folding laundry. He was good looking, with brown hair and well-shaped arms, in a simple black shirt and dusty jeans. Castiel tried to guess details about his life from each item he folded. He owned an assortment of long-sleeved plaid shirts and several t-shirts-Castiel caught a flash of lettering across the fronts, possibly band names. He'd heard of AC/DC. Cornflower blue shirts spoke of uniforms, perhaps from a hardware store or a mechanic's shop. Several pairs of pants followed: jeans and khakis and a pair of plaid drawstring pants that were likely for sleeping. He folded each item and laid them in the basket. Finally, he shook out a few pairs of boxers, folded them in half, then quarters, and set them on top of the pile.