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It was a Thursday when Castiel died.
He had a soul. It didn’t smell the same as most other souls, and it didn’t squish quite right if you squeezed it, but it was there. And so, he went to Heaven.
Castiel’s Heaven, to start with, was a little jetty poking into a huge mirror of a lake, surrounded by trees. Across the lake, ghostly mountains could be seen and the sky was a perpetual pink-golden sunrise.
Castiel sat on the jetty for an eternity, watching soft ripples lap against the wood. Silver fish flashed beneath the surface as they darted past, and from time to time great, beautiful birds dived in to try to catch them. If Castiel stretched out his wings as they passed, the great birds would call out to him, to say “Brother! Catch fish with us!”.
But Castiel only watched the great birds, and the darting fish, and the pink-golden sunrise, and the ghostly mountains, and the mirror of a lake, for an eternity.
Until one day, many many millions of days after he arrived, the bees came.
It started with a buzzing sound by his left ear. He swatted at it absently then froze. This was new. There had been nothing new here before. He turned his head and observed the bee, as it weaved a path at random through the air around him. Eventually it landed, a few paces away from where Castiel sat, and Castiel reached out a hand towards it. This only startled the bee, who flew away over the lake and disappeared from sight.
Soon after, another bee came, and another, and another, until there was a small swarm around the angel’s ethereal form. Castiel watched them with wonder as they floated about, sometimes landing on him and sometimes vanishing into the distance.
The buzzing created a nagging feeling within him, the first feeling he’d had since arriving that wasn’t contentment. He felt that they were here for a purpose but he couldn’t fathom it.
Over an enormous span of time, as they buzzed around him and he simply watched, he began to feel as though he could understand them.
“Come this way!” they said to each other, and soon after the swarm would ripple and move one way. “Over there!” they said to each other, and the swarm would move the other way. When they saw a great bird, they would call out its name together – not that the birds would ever respond. Still, it was a long time before Castiel figured out that the bees wanted him to go somewhere. And who was Castiel to question the wisdom of bees?
So up he got from his place on the jetty, his monumental body stiff, and followed the bees, who began to fly off into the trees as he stood. He followed deep into the woods, deep enough that the morning sunlight couldn’t penetrate through the canopy. Being a celestial being, he could see perfectly well in the darkness but the feeling of contentment had left him when the light did.
Suddenly the bees disappeared and Castiel came to a halt. He could see ahead of him, between two trees, the corpse of a car. It was rusty, with no windows, and the headlights had been smashed. A sapling seemed to be growing through the car and it poked out where the windshield should have been. Castiel frowned. There was that nagging feeling again, that there was a message here that he couldn’t yet understand.
He approached the car, stooping to get a good look at it. He tilted his head in confusion. Why did the bees bring him here?
Impulsively he decided to sit in the car. He climbed into the passenger seat and sat amongst the plants growing there, shrinking his body to fit. As he patted the dashboard by instinct, it felt familiar and a word appeared in his mind.
Dean
Castiel didn’t remember what the word meant.
After a long while of sitting in the car, he made up his mind to return to the lake, where he watched the lake and the fish and the great birds for a while longer, turning the word over and over in his thoughts.
Dean is a person. The thought stuck him after some time. He rose and turned back towards the trees, as a bee hummed nearby. Dean is a person I used to know when I was … Alive?
“Alive” had a feeling attached to it, a feeling of a different place where the sun moved and the days didn’t last for an eternity. Castiel had been alive once, and had died on a Thursday.
Slowly pictures started to form in Castiel’s mind. Dean’s face was among them, as well as other people – Sam, other angels, humans whose names were gone but faces remained. He remembered how pain felt, and what it meant to be contained in a vessel. After another eternity, the sun began to move. The great birds stopped coming by.
As the sun reached its peak in the rich blue of the sky, Cas realised where he was.
“Heaven,” he said aloud. A shadow moved in the corner of his eye, and he whipped around to face it but it was gone. There were other angels here, he knew. Had they been keeping him from remembering?
Suddenly he felt compelled to return to the decaying car in the woods. As he reached it, it occurred to him that it was the car from his memories – Dean’s car. The Impala. What was it doing here? Did Dean die too?
Cas felt panic rising in his chest and he glanced around, eyes narrowed. He had to get out of here, and find Dean.
He touched the roof of the car, which turned black beneath his hand. Shiny, new. The effect spread until the whole vehicle gleamed, the windows restored and flora removed. Cas climbed into the driver’s seat, shrinking his body to fit. He turned the key which hung from the ignition.
The engine started and revved.