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Castiel doesn’t want this assignment.
It isn’t that he thinks it beneath him—none of God’s work is less than holy—and it isn’t from laziness either. In truth, he isn’t sure why the offered honor of serving makes him long for the frozen depths of the ocean, as though he would feel this Call any less in the suffocating dark. He refuses before he knows that he means to speak, and the words—the wrongness of them—sours milk and boils eggs in their shells for miles around.
The cherub digs the point of its sword into the mountainside, creating a burning fissure in the earth, and asks, “Do you refuse to lift a sword against the Fallen, even now?”
The accusation stings: a double reminder of the time before the Fall, when Lucifer favored him above all others, and of the time after, when his brethren looked upon him with suspicion. Even God’s favor wavered then. Castiel felt it in the chill wind that ruffled his wingtips, and in the dimming of the light in his eyes.
By the time the Father relented, he was all but blind and frozen: huddled in on himself miles deep beneath the Arctic ice and willing to pay any price for forgiveness. Leveled so soon after the Betrayal of His firstborn and best loved, that price was high indeed. Castiel still bears the scars of his penance.
He can no longer remember the Morning Star’s face. He does not hear Lucifer’s dulcet tones when he moves unseen among the Father’s favored children. He cannot recall the feel of another’s wings against his bare skin, although the Lord God left him—perhaps mercifully, perhaps not—with the knowledge that he should know, and once did.
Once, he was favored above all others, and beloved.
The cherub stands over him, nothing like those laughable, plump children that humans imagine. It stands tall and four-faced, clad in holy armor and bearing the sword of its office, and Castiel knows that it will not ask its question a second time. It will not leave either, until he answers.
“No,” he says.
It must be true because the word leaves his mouth and he still has his wings, mantled in close to his body for whatever frail protection they can offer.
The cherub hefts its flaming sword up onto one broad shoulder. Castiel thinks that it might strike him down even though he gave the right answer—he is all but outcast among the cherubim, who remember the War with unflinching perfection—but instead it turns its back on him, which is almost worse.
“Think hard on your answer, servant,” it commands, a thunderclap, and Castiel bows his head. When he looks up again, the cherub is gone.
He stays only long enough to whisper a blessing of prosperity over the land tainted by his refusal and then flees across the Atlantic, far from the task to which that the Father would have him set his shoulder. If he hears a voice shrieking from within the Veil, it’s only one more mortal among millions, and easy enough to ignore.
Castiel isn’t his real name. It isn’t even the one the humans use for him, although it’s kissing close and he is permitted his small deviance.
He had another name once: before Lucifer Fell and left him weeping and alone. The Lord God bestowed that first, true name upon him at his creation, and then, later, Lucifer made it his own. The Morning Star whispered Castiel's name in flame-swept darkness. He branded it across Castiel’s slender hips and burnt his own name into the jutting bones of Castiel’s wings.
Both names are lost now, of course. The Father took Lucifer's back when He cast him down, molten and broken, and locked him away within the Veil. Sometimes, Castiel thinks that is also when he lost his own name: long before the Lord God’s punishment rested heavily upon him. He thinks that Lucifer took it with him when he Fell into barren, lightless depths.
Castiel can’t be sure, though. His memories of those distant times are either faded or gone. He doesn’t remember how he became who he is now: an angel of solitude and tears, unseen witness to the death of kings.
When he tries to look at himself in the mirror of the ocean—when he tries to read his lost name on the scroll of his body where Lucifer etched it—he finds that God has wiped him clean, and an empty page stares back at him.
God sends to him again. It has been a month on Earth: a month which Castiel spent losing himself in the winding streets of Venice. When the Metatron finds him, he is walking, solitary as ever, with one wing trailing in the canal.
“You have been Called,” the Metatron announces.
Castiel lifts his wing from the water and kneels, dropping his eyes. His submissiveness is automatic, although he thinks that it was not always so. There was a time, once, when he was strong enough in his faith to look the Metatron in the face without quaking. There was a time when the three of them spent long hours in quiet talk and laughter.
Now he speaks to the dirty cobblestones. “I cannot. You must choose another.”
“Why?” the Metatron asks. Its voice makes the question a command.
Castiel looks up into a whirl of wings, all but blinding with God’s light, and answers, “I don’t know.”
It is the truth again, although some part of him must at least suspect a deeper, truer answer, because a solitary feather falls from his left wing to the ground, where it lies silent and accusing. The Metatron reaches out a hand and the feather lifts, rising obediently to its palm. It studies the feather carefully and then, in a painfully kind voice, says, “In remembrance of the joy we once shared, I will ask again. It is a great honor, to be chosen for this task.”
“I cannot,” Castiel whispers. “Let Him ask something else—anything else—and I will go, gladly. I will sing His praises loudly enough to light the Veil with His name.”
He knows that he has spoken ill from the sudden darkening of the sky, even before the Metatron tells him, “We do not dictate terms to the Father. As for the Veil, it is darkened. It will remain darkened, and what lies on the far side will never know His light. So has He spoken.”
“I know,” Castiel says, flattening himself as low as possible on the ground. “Forgive me.”
The Metatron is silent for a long moment and then a feather—Castiel’s own—brushes the side of his face. “You are not the only one who misses him, brother. You are not the only one who mourns.”
“I cannot mourn what I do not remember,” Castiel says. He sees the feather float to the ground through a sheen of tears.
“Then cease this foolishness and do as you are told.”
Castiel cannot find his voice, but he knows that his silence is answer enough.
When it comes again, the Metatron’s voice bears the ice of a thousand winters. “You cannot deny His Will a third time, Cassiel.”
Castiel’s tears melt furrows into the stone. “Please,” he begs. “Please, just leave me alone.”
“He has work for you,” the Metatron tells him, implacable, and is gone in a halo of light.
In the early days after the Fall, when the full force of God’s displeasure was on him and he choked on ice with every breath, Castiel yearned for a chance to prove himself. He would have done anything, then, at the slightest hint of favor.
But the years have been long and bitter, and he has uncovered a new sensation within his heart that his brethren do not understand. Castiel doesn’t understand it himself, not really: he was not made to understand such things.
But, understanding or not, Castiel fears.
The third time, there is no messenger: no Metatron. There is only God’s voice, and the wind of His Will, and there is no resisting. Castiel quakes from the force of the Calling as he drops down from the outer reaches of the stars, dragged unwilling and terrified to stand in a quiet forest. A crude wooden cross pokes out of the ground at his feet. There is no name on the wood: nothing to tell that the body beneath it was once loved other than two splintering slats.
“Please,” Castiel whispers one last time, almost four months after that first command, but there is no reprieve, and so he reaches across space and time and into the Veil: into the place that the humans call Hell.
There is no sense of Lucifer here: no lingering, familiar echoes or quiet enticements. There is only pain and suffering and darkness. Although Castiel thinks that his fear should lessen now—that was what he was dreading, isn’t it? That the Morning Star would see him, and ensnare him far from the Father’s grace?—it remains strong within him. Only the gentle pressure of God’s Will at his back sends him deeper.
Castiel moves in a circle of his own reflected light, a holy thing in a barren land, and although it should be the work of lifetimes to find one screaming soul amongst the countless lost, he finds the one he wants almost immediately. It’s the only other bright thing here: like him, it doesn’t belong. The soul casts a gold glow over everything, like burning bush on a mountaintop, and he is drawn to it with painful urgency.
He isn’t the only one, he sees as he comes closer.
They are all drawn to it: these twisted, pitiful souls that call themselves demons. They tear at the light in vast, untold numbers: vicious and eager to mangle it beyond repair. They want to extinguish the light so that they can no longer see themselves: so that they can no longer see what they have become. They visit sins and torments on it that Castiel cannot understand, nor does he want to. For the first time since the War, he feels something other than sorrow or terror.
Anger.
Burning the dark things is a mercy, both for them and the light. They crumble to ash before him, revealing the soul he came for in its entirety, and Castiel finds that he has to avert his eyes from the glare. He reaches out with one hand, carefully, and touches the light. His palm feels burnt by the contact and his wings quake, sending ripples through the darkness.
He tightens his grip and, as gently as possible, pulls.
The force of their reentry is stronger than Castiel expects and he belatedly shields the blast: knocks down a forest instead of the entire state. The sun overhead is both unsettling and alarming, and seems pale compared to the remembered flare of light in the darkness. The cross has fallen as well, shattered into pieces.
Crude marker as it was, Castiel feels a pang of guilt at the sight. Someone placed it there in love and reverence, and his own clumsiness is poor reason for such care to have been destroyed. With a sweep of one wing, he lifts the fragments from the ground and reassembles them before planting the marker back into the earth.
Then, finally, he allows himself to look down at the trembling soul in his hands.
Its light is less intense here in the warmth of God’s presence, and the soul itself seems like such a small thing: fragile. Castiel can see the numerous tears and mangled, leaking wisps where the tormented denizens of Hell had their way with it. It doesn’t look strong enough to have cast such a light. It doesn’t look strong enough to survive the brunt of God’s Will.
A terrifying thought occurs to him.
He could take this soul. He could take it and hide it away in a tiny, gold-winged butterfly on the other side of the world. He could place it in some distant, isolated star and hide its soft, alluring glow.
Castiel strokes the soul and it flutters weakly against his fingers.
He can disobey, if he chooses.
He can disobey and Fall.
Castiel hesitates, and the world turns around him and waits for his decision.
God made angels to love. That was their first purpose, before all else. They were formed from God’s heart and His loneliness and so they have equal measures of both.
Castiel understands this, and so he knows that he is not entirely to blame for what happened with Lucifer. He was made for love, they both were, and perhaps the Morning Star received a little too much of the Father’s loneliness and too little of His heart, and perhaps that is why he turned his terrible, wonderful attention to Castiel.
From the fringes of his missing memories, Castiel knows, at least a little, what it was like to be the Morning Star’s beloved. He remembers enough to weep at the loss, and to ache for it even when the full brunt of God’s love is upon him.
It is whispered that Lucifer Fell because he was arrogant, or because he was resentful of mankind. Castiel knows that those are untruths because God has left him with that memory also, clarion clear like a bell.
Lucifer Fell because he loved Castiel more than he loved God.
After several millennia of wondering, Castiel still doesn’t know whether God was angry with him because he was the reason for His first-born’s Fall, or because he didn’t—couldn’t—follow where Lucifer led.
In the end, Castiel does as he was told.
He places the tattered, glowing soul back where it belongs and then lays one hand on the rotting flesh of what used to be a man’s shoulder. He lets God’s Will flow out of him and into that flesh, feels the body mending, and then releases it as the man takes his first, gasping breath.
The man opens his eyes and Castiel, shocked and shaken, flees.
He has been a watcher among mankind since before the great flood. He has seen beauties: women and men so finely formed that they rivaled Heaven’s splendor. This is different. This man is different.
Those hurt, confused eyes seemed to look into him: through him. The soul reflected within, as broken as it is, shed aching light on the dark, lost places inside of him.
Castiel stands well back and hidden, watching as Dean Winchester claws his way free from the earth, and finally understands why he was so frightened of this task.
Lucifer loved Castiel best and Fell.
Castiel loved God best and flew.
Now, for the first time, he feels his wing beats falter.
There was a man in Rome, once. A holy man. He was sitting by a fountain with a wooden beggar’s bowl in his hands. The rich would put coins into the bowl and the man would hand them away again almost immediately to the vagrant, dirty children and the destitute men and women who came to the fountain to drink.
The holy man looked straight at Castiel and greeted him in the common tongue. They conversed for a full week—in the quiet of the night, when no one else was there to hear the deafening noise of Castiel’s voice. Then, one evening, Castiel returned to the fountain and found the holy man’s body floating in the red water. The bowl was cracked in two on the pavement, empty.
He never knew the holy man’s name.
Castiel is certain that Dean is like that man, and like others he has seen over the years: those few who can see an angel’s true form, and hear his voice. No one with such a bright, beautiful soul could be anything but special. He’s so certain that he tries twice, despite the monumental failure of the first attempt.
The second time, he drifts away with the intention of fleeing again. Dean is too unsettling. He should be things that he isn’t, and is things that he shouldn’t be, and Castiel just doesn’t know what to make of him. He doesn’t understand why he was chosen for this, unless God thought him more immune to the draw of such a soul: thought that anyone who could resist Lucifer’s light would have no difficulties with a mortal.
It shakes him to the core to consider that possibility because the Father is never wrong. Never.
Except this time He is.
Dean summons him. Dean summons him with a ritual that shouldn’t work but does because his soul burns too fiercely to be denied.
Castiel answers the prayer of a devout tax accountant several cities away and brings the man’s body to the place where Dean is. Dean shoots him and stabs him and neither hurts as much as the lack of faith in the man’s eyes, and his refusal to believe that he deserves redemption.
Castiel hides behind his orders and manages, somehow, to keep his hands and wings to himself, even though he can sense the brand of his touch on Dean’s skin. Even though that shredded, shining soul is peering out at him and begging to be healed.
“What the hell do you want from me?” Dean demands, once he’s recovered a little from the shock of revelation.
“Not me: God,” Castiel corrects, and another feather drifts loose at the half lie. “We will speak again soon,” he adds, and then puts Dean to sleep the same way he quieted the first mortal before the man can argue with him.
It’s easier to flee without the weight of those tempting green eyes on him.
Lucifer isn’t the only angel who ever Fell. He isn’t the first, and he isn’t the last. He’s only the most famous because he was first-born, and because he brought so many others with him. He’s famous because he fought to keep his wings and, as an added punishment, was thrown into the darkness of the Veil.
God regrets the Morning Star’s loss more than any of the others because of the way that he Fell: because he fell for love, and not for a lie or some other sin. None of the rest Fell for so noble a reason.
Castiel could do without the honor of being the second, but he’s beginning to think that he doesn’t have a choice in the matter.
Castiel is tired, worn down by battling both his own, weak desires and Hell’s countless legions, and so when Dean pushes too hard during their second conversation, he pushes back.
“You should show me some respect,” he says, and steps close without thinking about it.
Dean’s eyes, nervous, flick here and there on Castiel’s face, and his too beautiful, too bright soul mutes. It damps down and pulls deep inside of itself: cringing. Castiel aches to reach inside of the man and haul the light back up again, back where he doesn’t have to strain to see it. The hand that left its mark on Dean’s shoulder twitches with a more unfocused, confused yearning that leaves him even more off balance than before. Leaves him wrathful in a way he can’t remember ever having been.
“I dragged you out of Hell,” he threatens. “I can throw you back in.”
Looking into Dean’s eyes—looking inside of him—is like watching a candle gutter. Although Dean isn’t letting himself remember what happened within the Veil, his soul can’t forget. It will never forget the red, slick torments, and the ripping, and the darkness. It still bears open wounds and thick, corded scars from its time there.
Castiel’s wrath snuffs out instantly, leaving him trembling with guilt. He flees before Dean’s eyes can lift to find him again. Flees before the man gets a good look and realizes just how flawed his guardian is.
Dean deserves better—he deserves a warrior of the light: someone pure in faith—but Castiel has asked and asked and asked, and he isn’t going to be reassigned.
Castiel has never known war before. He didn’t fight during Lucifer’s War: he fled. He hid from the burning light of the Morning Star's attention and the cold wind of the Father's displeasure, and by the time he crept out to take a look around, it was all over.
This time, he’s in the middle of everything. High councils, war plans, battles. He dips both wingtips in blood and watches his brothers die and weeps with the horrible, useless waste of it all. He weeps to think that this is only a pale imitation of that distant, unremembered War.
Sometimes, though, he laughs.
God has sent Lucifer’s Bane to stop his Ascension. He has appointed Castiel to Damn the Morning Star a second time.
The irony of it hasn’t escaped him.
When he checks on Dean again—just a cautious, flitting glance—the man is in a diner. His eyes are on a human female by the counter as he eats his burger, and deep inside of Castiel, something horrible and hot and fierce trembles. The glance becomes a look: penetrating.
It’s easy to look into the man’s heart, and there’s no love there. There isn’t even any lust. There’s only a wistful, aching longing to be whole again—a longing that Dean is probably mistaking for something else, judging from the open appreciation on his face.
Castiel drifts closer, pulled by the faltering, maimed light within the man, and then the diner door opens. Dean looks over at the sound and suddenly his soul is shining brighter than Castiel has ever seen it. There’s a supernova beneath Dean’s skin, and it burns, and it blinds, and Castiel has to avert his eyes.
He turns from his charge and there is the other.
The brother.
Sam Winchester, demon-tainted and cursed.
Darkness twines through his soul. Red and yellow snakes of power curl across his skin.
He’s been using what he was given.
He’s been using what he was given and Dean’s soul, mangled as it is, sings for him. Sam Winchester makes Dean shine.
So. This is what jealousy feels like.
Over the years, Castiel has wondered at the magnificent variety of human dreams: at how far even the dingiest soul can stretch itself in the long watches of the night. At times, he has also wondered what it would be like to dream. He has wondered what he would see there.
A forgotten face?
A surrendered name?
Is that where God put his memories? In that vast, empty space that mortals fill with their imaginings?
Angels don’t sleep. They can’t dream.
It isn’t until he stands guard over Dean Winchester’s slumbering form that he begins to wonder if that is a blessing.
Dean is dreaming again and Sam is gone. Neither is an uncommon occurrence, but this time Castiel can feel the memories of Hell coming off of Dean’s body like heat. The flush of emotion that moves through his chest is solid enough that he recognizes it. Part of him remembers it, vaguely, from his time with Lucifer before the Fall.
This is tenderness. This is a love as different from what he feels for the Father as day is from night. He loves God because of what he is. He loves Dean in spite of it.
Castiel stands by the human’s bed and looks down at him. Dean’s face twitches with his dreams—nightmares, humans call them when they turn sour—and the pain there makes Castiel ache. Worse, though, is the way that Dean’s soul thrashes inside of him: the way it curls in on itself and then writhes against the confines of Dean’s body as though all of that lovely flesh were nothing more than a prison of blood and meat and bone.
Castiel wants to soothe those frantic spasms. He longs to bend close and stroke his wings against Dean’s soul: to leave the human whole and shining again. He’s starting to bend closer when the command comes, rocking through his body with a force close to pain.
“No. He must remember.”
“Why?” Castiel asks. When he turns his head, he finds the Metatron watching him from a darkened corner. “Why does he have to hurt like this? I don’t understand.”
The Metatron maintains its reproving silence long enough to remind Castiel that it isn’t his place to understand, and then says, “Samuel Winchester strays too near the darkness. You will send Dean back to the time Azazel’s path crossed his mother’s. He will learn what he may there and then you will bring him back here and tell him the rest. You will tell him to mind his brother.”
Castiel’s borrowed heart speeds in his chest. “Please,” he whispers. “Don’t make me hurt him like that.”
Because it will hurt him. By now, he has seen his charge with Sam Winchester often enough to know that it will hurt Dean a great deal. It will cripple his light.
“You have your orders,” the Metatron replies, and then, with a whisper of feathers, is gone.
Castiel slowly moves over to the opposite side of the bed and sits with his back to the human. Then, bowing his head, he folds his hands on his lap and waits for Dean’s nightmare to wake him.
It takes Castiel all of one heartbeat to understand just how deeply Dean loves his brother. Dean loves Sam with an unyielding, devastating purity that burns everything else to ash. He loves Sam with such perfect devotion that Castiel is left feeling small and humble and more alone than ever: trailing after a human who isn’t capable of seeing anyone past his brother.
Dean loves Sam the way, Castiel suspects, that Lucifer loved him.
It takes him longer to recognize himself in Sam’s casual acceptance of that devotion—in Sam’s preoccupation and his well-intentioned but misguided journeys in the night—but eventually that comes as well.
From the shadowed edge of sight, Castiel watches them both and, for the first time, understands the Father’s anger.
When Dean walks away from his brother—from the terrible knowledge of what his brother has become—Castiel follows his charge. He stands at the edge of the alley, hesitant, while Dean swears and kicks over a trashcan and hurls the lid after a couple of fleeing rats. It isn’t until Dean sinks down onto the pavement, back pressed against the wall and soul shivering beneath his skin, that he steps forward into substance and walks over to stand next to the human.
Dean glances up: eyes too wide with pain and tear tracks rushing down his cheeks. He doesn’t bother trying to hide the fact that he’s been crying—is still crying. Just leans his head back against the wall and shuts his eyes.
“What the fuck do you want?” he says tonelessly.
If Dean were an angel, Castiel would know how to comfort him, but if Dean can’t bear the sound of his voice, then none of the usual songs of benediction are going to help. And if he folds his wings close around the mortal, then he isn’t going to be able to stop himself from doing things he has no business doing.
Not with Dean Winchester.
Not if he wants to keep his wings.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Dean laughs, a bitter sound that makes Castiel flinch, but doesn’t say anything.
“Dean,” Castiel tries.
“Don’t. Whatever—fuck, just.” Dean scrubs a hand across his closed eyes and then looks up at Castiel again. Deep below the green, his soul is small and ragged and limping. “What the fuck do you want from me?” The question is soft and almost plaintive.
“I want,” Castiel starts, and then stops. He can’t answer the question. Well, he can, but he’s afraid to. Afraid of God, and of Dean, and even of himself.
He’s never been so terrified before in his life.
“Now you clam up,” Dean mumbles. “Couldn’t’ve done that about an hour ago, could you?”
“You needed to know,” Castiel tells him.
“Yeah, well, I know, okay? You happy now?”
“No.”
Dean is up on his feet and shoving Castiel back against the opposite building before Castiel quite knows what’s going on. He tosses his wings out, startled, and it’s a mistake because they’re hovering so close to Dean’s skin, so very close, and Dean hesitates even in the midst of his anger. He can’t see the wings, not with his mortal eyes, but his soul—that bright, shining soul of his that remembers the Veil: remembers being torn free from torment and cradled close—can sense them.
“Wha—” Dean starts to ask, and then his soul uncurls, reaching, and Castiel can’t help but drop his wings that last, tiny distance.
The shock runs through his entire being, and it leaves him as shaken and awed as the Father’s voice. Dean is worse off. His breath punches out and he falls into Castiel, shivering and blinking dazedly at nothing in particular. His heart is pounding at an alarming rate and without thinking Castiel strokes one wing along his back, soothing.
“Shh,” he murmurs.
Dean’s hand fists the lapel of Castiel’s coat. “Ung,” he manages.
Even in the midst of this bliss—in the midst of stroking his wings against that shining soul—Castiel is mindful not to heal. He isn’t far gone enough to disobey a direct order: not yet. But if he can’t heal, he can still comfort. He can offer comfort the human way.
“Let me comfort you,” he whispers, and presses his lips against Dean’s cheek.
Dean makes a tiny, wild noise and turns his face and this … this is kissing. Castiel opens his lips and kisses back, letting Dean’s tongue push into his mouth while folding his wings more completely around Dean’s soul. He remembers, dimly, that this is what passion feels like.
Let me love you, he thinks, slipping the words directly into Dean’s mind, and Dean shudders. Dean’s hands go to the buttons on Castiel’s shirt and fumble with them.
“Please,” he begs between kisses. “Please please please—”
“Yes,” Castiel replies. There isn’t anything else he can say. Not to Dean.
He never thought that Falling could feel so much like Flying.
Afterward, Castiel bears his charge to a nearby motel and checks him in. Dean is still blissed out and near mindless in his arms—probably because Castiel can’t stop stroking his soul—and doesn’t put up a struggle when Castiel strips him and lays him down on the bed. Standing by Dean’s side, Castiel drags his wings up and down Dean’s body and revels in the way the human twitches and shivers. Delights in the way his soul pulses brighter and stronger with every pass.
Dean twists on the bed, panting. Sweat glistens on his skin: smooth and whole from Castiel’s touch. The handprint on his shoulder, Castiel’s brand, burns like a watch fire. Castiel reaches out and places his hand over the mark and Dean’s back arches. His lips part and he chokes out a single, desire-drenched word.
Sammy.
Shocked and pained, Castiel flees so quickly he leaves several feathers behind.
He’s sitting by the ocean watching the sun come up when the Metatron finds him. It stands beside him, just out of sight, and waits for the reddened disc to breach the ocean’s surface. Then it says, “You are weeping again.”
Always, Castiel thinks. He feels broken inside: tiny pieces of his faith and worship and love jumbled together and grating. “Did you come to gloat?”
“To rejoice,” the Metatron corrects him gently. “We did not think he would succumb to you so soon.”
That breaks through Castiel’s misery and he lifts his head. “What?”
“We needed a warrior to combat the Morning Star’s armies. We needed a human who has dwelt in the darkness and remembers what that was like. We needed a man who would put nothing before God’s command. Not even his brother.”
“I—I don’t understand,” Castiel stammers.
“We chose you because you shone brightly enough to entice the Morning Star’s eyes from the Father. We knew of no other who could draw Dean Winchester’s eyes from his brother to the task before him, and yet would remain unswayed by his light.” One of the Metatron’s wings brushes Castiel’s face. “You are the perfect vessel.”
Castiel has served since the first moment of his creation, but he has never felt used before. He stares out at the ocean for a long moment and then puts his face in his hands and starts to laugh. Metatron steps back, feathers ruffling.
“Why are you doing that?”
“Because you’re blind,” Castiel says. “Because I’m in love with Dean Winchester, and he will never love anyone but his brother.” He lifts his head again and regards the sun. Feels the grace of the Father’s touch on his face. “Because I finally understand, and I would rather Fall and love, than Serve and deceive.”
It doesn’t hurt. There is one, final brush—like a farewell kiss—and then he’s sitting in pile of feathers. He’s still wearing the tax accountant’s body—his own body, now—but the human’s soul is with the Father and Castiel doesn’t think that he would mind. When he looks to his side, he can’t see the Metatron any longer, not with these human eyes, but he knows that it’s still there.
“Forgive me, Father, for I think I am about to sin,” he says. Then, after a pause to consider, he adds, “Quite a lot.”
There’s no response—no thunder or lightning or earthquakes: nothing but the steady pound of the surf—and so he stands up and starts walking. It’s a long way back home—back to Dean—and Castiel no longer has the wings to fly. It doesn’t matter, though. He’ll make it. Somehow, they both will.
He has faith.