Work Text:
The thing about working in a quiet gas station convenience store in rural Idaho was that it afforded one a lot of time for reflection. Truthfully, Castiel had had a lot to think about in those idle hours. Time to sort some things out for himself, to sift through the warm and confusing bursts of sensation that accompanied being more or less human. In so many ways his senses had been truncated, had withered into nothing. But it was odd, he thought, how that could be true and yet at the same time he had gained hundreds, thousands of feelings he could never have imagined. Unlimited, dispassionate power traded for a universe of powerless, helpless, and wonderful emotion. It was a queer duality.
And he was discovering not all those feelings were positive ones. There was pride, satisfaction, small pleasures and joys. But those first weeks had been truly awful; cold, lonely, filled with hunger, frightening. These things tangled together in a writhing ball that sat heavy in his chest. In the lowest of moments, it felt like that mass had vice-like tendrils wrapped around his heart, his lungs, constricting them in time with the pulse of his despondency.
He’d found it was worst when he thought about Dean, especially after the hunter sent him away. It wasn’t as if Castiel harbored any delusions about his continuing usefulness, stripped of his powers as he was. But a part of him had hoped that maybe… maybe he was worth something else. Something beyond his utility.
He remembered Dean’s words as he knelt in the crypt, as Castiel’s own hand was raised to deliver a lethal blow.
We’re family.
We need you.
Even in the cloying mist of Naomi’s whispers (do it, Castiel, kill him, be the good solider you were always meant to be) those words had thrown off light and burned away the fog. The makeshift-but-better family he’d gained to replace the one he’d lost when he turned his back on Heaven needed him. And so he laid down his sword.
But the words that had shone the brightest had come after.
I need you.
Dean, a constant beacon in an overwhelming, choppy ocean of disobedience needed him. Those were the words that cut through the haze. Those were the words that rung glittering and shimmering like the sharp, fading hiss of a cymbal, like the dark, throaty resonance of a gong.
Things happened so fast after that. The world had fallen out from under his feet and everything was a jumble, yet those words remained.
The fact also remained that they were just that: platitudes. The English language had a saying – actions speak louder than words. And Dean sending him away as he had, dismissing him, spoke volumes.
Their first meeting after the fact had been sour. Castiel had felt angry, betrayed, and very confused. While the strategist in him understood Dean cutting dead weight, the ever-growing human part of him wanted to lash out, to cry that Dean had told him he meant something. Seeing Dean standing there at the counter of the Gas-n-Sip had been alternately infuriating and like coming home.
He’d left Idaho a short while later despite Nora’s good-intentioned pleas for him to stay. The place was haunted for him now; every surface Dean had touched tainted by his presence until all Castiel could think about was how vindicated he felt watching Dean leave and how his heart clenched under those damned coils watching the same.
So he left. He packed his meager belongings in a backpack scavenged from the store’s lost and found box and hitchhiked into Wyoming. He found his way to Yellowstone. People along the way had so enthusiastically told him it was something he needed to go see – it was a human experience, they’d said, and that had been enough for Castiel. They’d been right, those travelers. In the majority of his millions of years he’d never had the ability to appreciate the beauty his absent father had wrought. The colors, the power, the space; it was all so awe-inspiring. He’d never felt smaller. His heart ached as he thought about Hael, the angel who made the Grand Canyon he’d murdered in cold blood when she’d been confused and lost just as he was now. He wondered which of his brothers or sisters had sculpted this resplendent wonder and if he’d slain them too.
And it was there, sitting at the edge of the Morning Glory Pool, that Castiel came to a realization.
Having so little experience with the tumult of chemicals and unnamed intensities, it was no wonder he hadn’t known sooner. But as he thought of the fine lines around Dean’s eyes when he laughed and the way his low, rusty voice warmed him like a cloak thrown across his shoulders, Castiel knew it to be true. The quiet epiphany sent bolts of what he recognized as longing down his spine and tingled through his fingertips. It was annihilation yet revelation.
Castiel walked out of Yellowstone an entirely different person. Tourists bumped into him as they milled around him, standing, lost in his own thoughts, just past the sign declaring the location in dated white typeface. He’d heard rumblings – underground, of course – about possible angel attacks nearby and he made a decision.
Dean would be coming to him, and he wasn’t going to waste more time hiding. The time had come to face the role he was to play, among other things. It wasn’t yet the moment for heart-felt confessions (those vines of doubt and anger and passion plucked his heart-strings like a harp at the thought of another rejection, but that was a thought for another time). It was, however, time to prove himself as the soldier he always was, worthy of standing by Dean’s side in the face of the onslaught he’d created. It was time to pick up the sword again, with new understandings and with those most staggering and radiant words of Dean’s singing in the back of his mind.