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He knows there’s a word for it, maybe not in his tongue or english or anything spoken over the last century, but it exists: A word for the slow not-quite-pain of forgetting, a word for the pause between being emptied and refilled, a word for knowing that you’ll gain more than you miss —but feeling that ache still.
Humanity, for Castiel, was an exercise in unlearning efficiency and earning inconvenience like so many of the battle scars he can no longer heal.
His body (Jimmy’s body becoming less Jimmy with every inhale and exhale of Cas’ lungs) wanted now. It called for meat and rest and all the things that lie between those base needs. The body grew tired and slept, the body grew hungry and ate, the body relieved himself in more highway rest-stops than he’d care to count (and, as the years went on, the numbers surpassed what his memory — shorter, sharper in some places, far duller in others— could count.)
He used to soar, he thinks. Blinking hard and purposeful in a way that conjured flight in his other life. Travel has since become a routine of road signs, rest stops and red-rock Americana serving as a backdrop to an aching back—and squinting, so much squinting, into the sun and the horizon line.
The shades of orange, umber, grey and gold kept beautiful— like so much else in his world, Cas knows—between soft smiles and softer words from the driver’s seat, by hands on his knees and green, green eyes with shade variations so vast and wonderful that Cas wishes every night (so hard it’s almost like a prayer) that he’d catalogued each one back when his eyes could manage the feat.
It was noisier then: The stimuli now crammed into five (maybe six depending on the alignment of the planets and the substances imbibed) senses were doubled and tripled over so many times. The reds were there, the greens were there, but they weren’t red or green— the mountain and his heart— so much as threads woven between everything else: the stars, freckles, the heavens ,laugh lines, the molecules, a voice, a chorus, the atoms, his wings and the bright, warm light of the soul beautiful enough to break him.
He can hear the melody sometimes, ghosting around his memory as a familiar tune. But once, he (heard, saw, tasted, smelled, felt and more-so) thoroughly embodied the symphony.
He felt himself straining to recapture those feelings on some days more than others. At night, his dreams can still overwhelm his vessel, pulling him back to consciousness in a cold sweat.
The first time Cas mistakes a city’s name, glaring at the atlas a half-inch from his face and his brow heavy with frustration, Dean clicks his tongue and says he knows a back road anyway.
When they get back to the car after servicing the loud wants of their bodies at the next rest stop, a pair of plastic-framed readers are balanced on the dashboard.
Cas frowns at them like they’d intruded of their own accord, but slips them on nonetheless, finding the word “Tucumcari” less offensive than before. Through the windshield, the rocks are crisp, cochineal and rust; to his left, freckles are back in focus and under green, green eyes there’s relief and another smile.
A few more hours before sleep, Dean promises, hands toying with the frays in Cas’ jeans (worn too many times to still be considered borrowed) before turning up the radio.
It’s another song he knows well. It’s miles and hours, stars and freckles, warm, calloused hands and familiar words hummed into his neck on chilly mornings. And it’s finer, Cas decides (sun still in his eyes) much finer than any symphony.