Chapter Text
The world is a bloody grey place once your eyes are open. Well: not that this place is grey. Angels seem to favour a specific shade of white (eggshell). Wonder why that is. Though: not important; irrelevant.
Not that I ever thought the world a grey place before. Before: that is the key world. I taste it in my mouth, move it from one side to the other, check its rough edges and sharp angles in ten different languages (aurretik, antaŭ, avant, prima, qaSpa', vor, ante, pred, prin, oldin, ennen, gō). It still tastes unfamiliar and sour. But: it cannot be helped. The world was not grey before meeting Dean Winchester; it is grey now (when Dean is gone, that is; always when Dean is gone).
I close my eyes, look for Dean’s soul for one, two heartbeats (not my heart’s; never my heart’s) and then I sense it, glowing, beautiful, only just marred by death. He seems to be in Europe (I consider, then discount, thirty-two different reasons why Dean should be in Europe, before conceding Gabriel’s motives are inscrutable), and it doesn’t matter, because he is safe.
Because death is, of course, a reversible condition. Even now (especially now). Dean can (will) be brought back to life. No other option.
I open my eyes again, look at Raguel (his true self; not his vessel), feel the buzzing of countless worlds pressing against my skin (the heat of a faraway desert; larks singing in ancient Greek; a woman cradling her child; Dean looking at Gabriel), look away again.
The way Dean looks at me: an intimate touch (although it is not; really not). Never focused on other humans enough to understand how unusual Dean’s gaze is. Never cared to. That was before I fell, though. Being looked at as a human: quite different. A direct link (a biological impossibility, and yet) between Dean’s eyes and my heart (though: still not my heart; not even then). Something to do with fight or flight response, perhaps (perhaps not).
The exact nature of those human feelings is gone now, forgotten, despite my (pathetic) attempts to hold on to it. The spiritual part I can still perceive, but every other element is just gone (something to do with shortness of breath, tachycardia, tremors, blood flowing the wrong way around, leaving me empty-headed and uncomfortable in my stolen clothes). I did not question this reversal of state. Feeling my own Grace back in this body was (exhilarating breathtaking completely necessary; not) enough. And I did not realize it would be so easy to flip everything over again. Touching Dean: all it took.
Raguel is still talking (dreary, monotonous, terribly important) and I take a step back inside my own mind; I remember Dean (touching Dean). I remember what Crowley said (hate towards demons is a precise, unshakeable instinct in all of us; and yet I never knew such wish for violence until that moment), what Dean said (It meant nothing.). I have wondered, then (I still do) what it means to mean nothing. How can a memory be unimportant? How do humans decide which memories can be neglected, which are to be preserved? I am everything; I remember everything. Not a reason to boast, this, and certainly not now. I have caught myself wishing (more than once) to be ordinary; to be human. I remember how it felt to be Steve, to work at the Gas-N-Sip (what it was like to fall asleep on a hard floor every night, shivering with cold, my body aching in unfamiliar places: my shoulders, my legs, my heart; except: not mine). It would be easier, surely, to be Steve. It would solve, perhaps, everything (an irony of Fate).
Except Dean didn’t like Steve (either). Dean didn’t stay.
Hands are still tingling from the memory of it (my skin on Dean’s). I know now what ‘meaning nothing’ means, because this means nothing. Dopamine. Oxytocin. Serotonin. Ordinary substances left over from an ordinary life. It is easy (too easy) to imagine I have crossed the border into actual human feelings as I was pressing Dean against the bar's wall. Easy to imagine he was feeling something, as well, and that his feelings matched mine (Can feelings match, jagged edge against jagged edge until the whole make sense? Does it stop hurting, then?).
The white room (eggshell white) is swimming around me now. Confusion, agitation, inability to focus on several planes of reality at once: the human condition. Again, ironic.
I remember Dean’s eyes shifting, as they sometimes (often) do, from my eyes to my lips. A clear sign of sexual attraction, according to visual media. But: Dean is in control of his sexual behaviour (I am not), is capable of faking it. I know this: I have seen him do it, more than once. Dean lies. He lies to get information, he lies to get himself out of danger. He lies, perhaps, because he likes to (I am not certain; not enough data to support this hypothesis). And if I am honest with myself (how could I not be? yet another disconcerting human expression), he needed both from me. He wants to live (still; always), and he needs me to care.
“Castiel?”
I am distracted. I am always distracted when Dean is around (I am distracted when he’s not). I need to focus. Work to do. Lives to be saved. The Mission.
I gaze at Dean’s soul one more time (the sound of it: nothing I ever heard before) before breathing out that plane of reality. Gabriel is with Dean now; Dean is safe. I do not need to know if he needs me to care because I am his friend (am I?), or simply because he is human, and, like all humans, he is afraid of the dark. I will still watch over him. Inevitable, fated, meant to be. Not a choice at all (it doesn't bother me; it never did).