To say that Dean was extremely confused about his life right now would be the biggest understatement in the history of understatements. That wasn't to say that he was unhappy - actually, that was about half of what was so confusing. In spite of all the crap that life or fate or the angels or whothefuckever kept throwing at him and his, Dean Winchester was ...actually pretty damn happy.
That didn't mean things were easy, of course. He and Jules were still trying to figure themselves - and each other - out, and he still woke up most nights with images from hell behind his eyes, and, yeah, the apocalypse was still looming over them, but in spite of all that, he was... happy, overall.
Of course, that didn't mean he wasn't confused. First of all, he wasn't used to being this particular kind of happy. It felt almost like it had to be an illusion, some kind of spell or dream, it was too present and calm. Dean wasn't used to calm. Even the quiet moments, growing up, just Dad and Sam, things were never really calm - there were always Dad's warnings and the constant training and the tension between Sam and the life they lived, and it was never like this.
Even with the absences in his life - his parents, most painfully of all - he was okay, and that didn't make sense. He was good at pretending to be fine, even good at being fine, but he wasn't good at being happy. Something was going to ruin this, wasn't it? How had he managed to avoid that so far?
Castiel's arrival had offered another layer of confusion over everything. Why didn't the angel remember the same things they did? Hell, he'd woken up in Lawrence with amnesia, dropped an entire year from his memory - but he hadn't picked up anything new, no alternate universe memories had planted themselves in his skull and dragged him along for the ride. He'd just been blank. Cas didn't seem blank, he had memories that, as far as Dean could tell from the brief conversation via network, were as real to him as anything else.
So, he was pretty worried. Given that he hadn't heard from the (then-falling) angel in way too long, and the reappearance being like this, Dean was willing to bet there was some kind of foul play involved. A trap, at the very least. He wasn't going to take his chances.
Spotting the familiar (seriously, did the guy have any other clothes? At all?) coat, and the figure inside it, Dean pulled up the car beside the bench the angel (man?) was leaning against. "Need a lift?" he called, leaning across the seat to tug the door-latch and shove at the door so it opened slightly.
There was salt in the leather and holy water in a flask in his lap, and even if there wasn't he was pretty sure he'd effectively demonproofed the car back when he'd made his wish two Christmases ago; Dean was sure that if this wasn't Cas, or if Cas was somehow something evil in whatever weird-ass universe he was from, he'd have a pretty damn hard time getting past the door, let alone taking a seat.
If it was him... well, they'd get to that when they got to it. Dean still wasn't sure what to do with a broken angel - where to take him, what to say or ask - his last experience with a broken-down Cas had been a bitchy Cas, a Castiel who blamed Dean and his inaction for the condition he was in. Not that he was wrong, he thought, then shoved the thought - and the accompanying none of this would happen if I just... that he didn't allow himself to finish thinking.