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For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.
1 John 2:16
It’s on that night, that humid, lukewarm night, in which the crickets chirp and no hint of breeze flitters through, Castiel realizes how far he’s fallen.
He knocks on the door.
He’s greeted by Dean Winchester, in his sweatpants and black t-shirt that’s ripped at the hem. The dull light of the motel room is radiating from behind him, illuminating the perimeter of his body as if he were lined with gold.
“Cas?” he asks, hesitant, his green eyes scanning over the no doubt countless injuries on Castiel’s body. “Are you okay?”
…
Castiel can’t find a way to describe the true forms of angels. Any approximation using human language would be at best trite and, at worst, insulting. Dean’s asked him to do it once before.
Rings that orbit the blinding core like planets around a star or electrons around the nucleus of an atom. Eyes attached to nothing in particular, swiveling in directions humans can’t even begin to comprehend. An ever-changing cacophony of heads, wings, limbs, wavelengths, fluctuations in energy over just a millisecond that can make the whole angel burst with bright light or suck in more than a black hole. Castiel had just told Dean to imagine a time lapse of every conceivable living creature across the course of its life and compress it all into a being roughly the size of the Chrysler building.
Most humans can’t perceive a true angel without it burning their eyes out of their skull. The sheer amount of information delivered to their brains upon seeing one is enough to fry the very nerves that transport the signal from their eyes. Angels are the epitome of power, superiority, prestige, supremacy, perfection.
Castiel thinks these beings don’t even hold a torch to Dean Winchester.
Enochian as a language has hundreds upon hundreds of times more words than any Earth language. There exist tenses to account for time travel and verbs specific to whole timelines. But there’s no better word in any of the thousands of languages Castiel knows to describe Dean Winchester than a fairly simple one in English: beautiful.
The closest adjective that exists in Enochian would be something along the lines of “pleasing to the eye” or “complacent”. Very few positive adjectives exist that don’t revolve around following orders or being suitable to someone’s standards. Dean is anything but the Enochian idea of beautiful — chaotic, reckless, rebellious, sometimes an all-around pain in the ass.
Beautiful as a word has so many meanings applied to it it’s often hard to keep up. It’s a compliment, when couples lovingly refer to each other as beautiful. It’s a vice, as Castiel has seen girls whisper to each other as Dean walks past: Be careful with him. He’s beautiful. They’re always the worst ones. Beautiful encompasses landscapes, people, writing, artwork, essentially anything that humans can observe.
Dean Winchester is beautiful, Castiel has decided. He may be infuriatingly stubborn and inflexible, loyal to a fault, constitutionally incapable of expressing emotions in a healthy way, closed-off, at times hypocritical, mischievous, immature, unable to stop making crude jokes and outdated references, impulsive, a borderline alcoholic… but he’s Dean Winchester. He’s crass, vulgar, coarse, brutal… but he’s Dean.
Dean Winchester would sacrifice everything for those he loves in a second. Always there to care for others no matter how vehemently he denies it. There’s a softness hidden in the way he carries himself, beneath all the masculine bravado, that just may have surfaced in his personality had it not been forced down by his father his whole life.
Something about him proves irresistible to every girl he flirts with at a bar, and Castiel is no different. He’s seen whole galaxies thrive and die, whole civilizations develop and crumble to the ground, but Dean Winchester’s silky voice and kind eyes are enough to make him feel weak in his vessel’s knees. Castiel wants him close, wants to touch him. Not because of a human lust for sex, but a lust for… closeness. When he imagines being able to hold Dean, to caress him, revere him, worship him with the swirled pads of his fingers, it makes his head spin. He needs Dean to know, know how Castiel sees him, with the same reverence that compels nuns and monks to give up their whole life and spend every day in devotion. He needs to know how much he means to the universe — and once the universe comes to a fiery end Castiel will go and find every bit of stardust that made up Dean Winchester and glue them back together to make him again.
…
“...Cas?”
Castiel clears his throat. “I’m fine. But it was a challenging hunt. The werewolf…” He gestures down to the cuts and scrapes on his vessel. “Damaged me.”
Dean sighs and scratches the back of his neck. “I can see that. C’mon in.” He steps back to allow Castiel into the motel. They sit down on one of the beds, facing each other, and Castiel can’t find the words to convey everything he wants to say.
“You’re…bleeding…” Dean mumbles, so low it’s almost a whisper. He raises a hand to Castiel’s face and brushes the apple of his cheek with his fingertip, so light it’s mostly just his nail, before pulling back hurriedly. As if he’s afraid his touch is poison. Castiel is struck with a sudden, strange urge to pull his hand straight back. To tell him his touch is warm and reassuring and that Castiel owes everything to him, because he does, he owes every second of his existence to the man in front of him. The Righteous Man who’s willing to kill for those he loves, the Faithless Man who put his trust in a complete fuck-up of an angel time and time again, not because he got anything out of it or it served him in any way, but because there’s such an irrevocable tenderness in him that can’t be fully beaten out of him by human or angel or demon or Leviathan or anything of the like.
“I’m okay, Dean,” Castiel says. “It’s just a scratch.”
Dean laughs nervously and palms the back of his neck. “Yeah. Yeah, no, of course.”
There’s an awkward silence between them as Castiel heals himself. This causes no inconvenience to him, as Dean surely knows, but the human’s eyes keep flicking up to check if he’s okay.
“Cas,” Dean starts. “You need to be more careful out there, y’know. Every time, you show up all battered and bruised. You— You worry me.”
“I can heal myself easily, Dean,” Castiel supplies, thinking the fact rather obvious.
“No, no, yeah, I know. It’s just…” He sighs and cuts himself off. “Just be careful, alright, buddy?” He gets up and claps a hand to Castiel’s shoulder, no trace of the former gentleness left. Castiel recognizes this as such a Dean thing to do: when he’s afraid he’s gotten too vulnerable, let too much slip, he defaults back to the tough exterior.
Castiel’s mind is still stuck on the touch to his cheek for an indeterminable amount of time after. It wasn’t with any kind of ulterior motive. Just…touch. For the sake of it. As if Castiel were a delicate vase that had to be approached with the utmost care and not a celestial being billions of years old. As if he deserved just as much care as any human. As if he were human.
…
God’s love is pure. God’s love is everlasting. God’s love is indiscriminate. God’s love is perfect and a model for how to love.
Every second that Castiel’s gaze lingers on Dean, he’s deviating a little more from Heaven. Angels aren’t programmed for anything as frivolous as human love , such a cumbersome and time-consuming endeavor, but God damn it, Castiel’s love is a selfish one. It’s blasphemy. He wants Dean all for himself. He feels a pang of jealousy when Dean’s flirting with some pretty girl and his eyes are on her and he’s touching her wrist and— and—
Castiel wants him. He wants Dean Winchester. Not the Michael Sword, not the Righteous Man, not the Soldier of Heaven. He wants Dean’s gentle and firm hands, his scent of whiskey and motor oil, his soul that pulsates with such pure being it shook Castiel to his core when he found it so shattered in Hell on that fateful day. He wants to wrap his wings around Dean and keep him shielded in the cocoon of feathers and never let him venture out into the cold, cruel world again.
And Castiel loves him.
He loves.
And there’s nothing he can do about it.
So it goes.