Remember When (teen-rated version)

Castiel Novak meets Dean Winchester in the summer of 1989 when they’re both ten years old. Growing up in small town Kansas is as all-American as climbing trees and little league baseball, but the carefree days of childhood can’t last forever. With adolescence comes new challenges, and Cas finds himself frustrated by decisions Dean makes that he can’t understand. After a big fight junior year, they stop speaking for months, and when tragedy strikes Cas’s family, there’s only time for a quick, heartfelt goodbye before the Novaks move away.

Six years later, after the death of his father, Cas takes a semester off from grad school and returns to Kansas. There he finds the woods where they used to play bulldozed into a housing development and the Winchester family similarly fractured and gone. In relaying this news to his mother, he learns Dean was keeping secrets of his own as they grew up, forced by circumstances to take on too much too young. Armed with this new information, Cas impulsively decides to drive west to find him and try to make things right.