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There was something special about Castiel.
Special being a very kind way of terming it from his family’s perspective – but that didn’t negate the fact that there was a certain je ne sais quoi that surrounded the enigmatic man that lived down the street.
There were many rumours that surrounded this man, each being as plausible as it was implausible, as it tended to happen when someone was kind, but did not go out of his way to speak with others, but the one thing that was absolutely true of him was his affinity for bees. The whole street knew of the bee guy at 52, even if they did not know his given name, or, really, anything else about him at all.
Emily had grown up next door to Castiel, and could not recall a time when she couldn’t hear the faint lazy buzz of busy bees during the long days of summer. Occasionally she would see a bee that had landed on the sunflowers her mother grew fly back over the fence into Castiel’s yard, but otherwise their existences were separate - the bees merely providing white noise in the background of her life.
On the Monday after school had let out for the summer, Emily had awoken to find a bee struggling on her window sill. She got up, intent on flicking it from her sight and back out into the world, but as she brought her finger in for the final stroke, she observed the bee - how it laboured and beat its wings in a futile attempt to regain flight, to return home, how tired it seemed.
Pitiable.
It was pitiable.
Though she had hardly given more than a nod and small wave to Castiel in passing (and received just as little in return), she made her way to his home, bee secured in a tiny cage in which she sometimes kept fireflies.
When he opened the door, he looked at her in confusion.
“Uh… hello..?”
“Hi. I think one of your bees is sick. He landed on my window sill and wouldn’t start flying again,” she said as she held up the little cage containing the bee for Castiel’s inspection.
“She.”
“What?”
“You said ‘he’ landed on your sill. That bee’s female,” he said as he opened his door wider and ushered Emily into his home.
She looked down at the bee as she followed Castiel into the kitchen. “How can you tell?” she asked, eyes narrowing at the bee as though it - she - had deliberately deceived her.
Castiel pulled honey from his pantry and a spoon from a drawer to his left. “Most bees are female,” he explained as he put a small amount of honey in the spoon. “The ones that leave the hive to gather food,” he went on as he motioned Emily to follow him out to the back porch, “are called ‘workers’, and they’re all female.” He set the spoon down on the small table that had certainly seen better days. “Go ahead and let her out. Gently, please.”
Emily did as she was bidden, and as the bee landed on the table, seeming to even struggle to her feet now, Emily found herself desperately hoping the bee would be okay.
Castiel seemed to catch the worry on the child’s face. He smiled. “She should be all right,” he assured as he brought the spoon closer to the bee. “She just needs a bit of energy before she can go on with her duties.”
“I was gonna flick her.”
It was said so quietly that Castiel had barely caught what had been said. “Flick her?”
“When she was on my sill. I was just gonna flick her out…or maybe, maybe smash her like a wasp, ‘cause I don’t wanna get stung, but right when I was about to do it, she just looked really sad, like she couldn’t even sting me if she tried.”
“Bees are actually very gentle, noble creatures. They don’t wish to do you harm.”
“Why do you like ‘em so much? It just seems a weird animal to be obsessed with.”
“Am I ‘weird’?”
“Yeah, everyone thinks so. You’re the Bee Guy.”
A small smile graced Castiel’s face. Shaking his head, he said, “Then nothing has changed, though the people have.”
Emily gave him a questioning look.
He released a happy sigh. “Once this bee is well, I could introduce you to my hive if you would like. Perhaps you’ll understand why I find them so fascinating.”
She looked over at the bee diligently sipping away at the honey provided for her, and smiled, thinking she was already beginning to see why Castiel liked them.
