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"This is the End ... Amen"
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free
But you'll never follow me
the end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end
The lyrics of the psychedelic rock song pumping through the speakers of the Bunker echo in Castiel's mind. "This is the End"
It shouldn't be. Everything went right for a change. They won.
Abaddon is dead. Metatron is imprisoned. The angels have returned to heaven.
Except Castiel. Instrumental in their fight. Leader. Who actually succeeded without hurting everyone he loved for once.
The angels are in heaven.
Castiel is in the warroom of the Men of Letters bunker in Lebanon, Kansas.
He's sitting, slouched in one of the chairs that surround the map table, looking nothing like himself in Dean's jeans and black motorcycle tee-shirt, Sam's charcoal-colored hoodie. He feels nothing like himself either. Smaller, somehow, although his vessel remains the same.
Sam is okay. Dean is okay too. Castiel used the last of the power of his wavering grace to remove that wretched, cursed Mark of Cain from Deans strong but mortal, human arm. His easily damaged skin.
Castiel pushes up a sleeve looks at his own arm, then decides he's too warm (he'd forgotten about all these temperature changes) and takes off the hoodie entirely.
His arm. Not the arm of the vessel his essense and grace are inhabiting. His arm. His fragile, mortal, breakable arm.
He's been human before, but this time it's different. This time its.....forever. He may still have his essense, but any residual Grace is gone. And so are all signs of Jimmy. He just knows it. Castiel could feel him before, and now he can't. When heaven was reopened to the angels, it was opened to Jimmy too and he finally recieved his reward for giving his body to Castiel all those years ago. Was it 'all those years' or 'just yesterday'? Castiel can't decide. Everything is muddled now. With no Jimmy and no grace it's just his essence and this body. It feels empty and confusing. There are too many holes where life and power used to be.
Jimmy is gone, but Castiel wouldn't call him back to this body even if he could. Jimmy is at peace.
Now his Grace, if he could get that back.... but there is no way. Castiel's grace is no more. Used in a spell to kick the angels out of Heaven. Somehow, as always, he'd been the one who started the mess he eventually had to clean up. They'd call him a hero but he was only fixing what was his fault to begin with.
Metatron had tricked him and he'd fallen for it easily. Stolen his grace, made him mortal and kicked him down to earth. Castiel had only regained his powers by stealing another angel's grace. It was worth it. He'd had to. It was the only way to defeat Metatron and restore the angels to heaven, mend all their wings.
This time he was mortal and staying that way. For one thing, there were no angels around to steal grace from. And for another, Castiel couldn't do that again.
Even when he knew his stolen grace was slipping away, fizzling out, he couldn't bring himself to take from one of his flock, or even one of his adversaries, the very thing that made an angel an angel. Even doing it the first time haunted Castiel and he'd never do that again- snatch the pulsing, glowing life-force of power and divinity, of connection to God, wherever he was, out of one of his brethren and take it as his own.
It was like theft, but worse. Like having an organ stolen? Worse. It was like rape. The worst human violation he could imagine. This was the best simile Castiel could draw with his limited understanding of metaphor.
When he'd stolen that angel's grace and taken into himself, he'd known exactly what he was doing. Exactly how aberrant he was acting, how outside what any angel - any creature of God - should do. Invasive. Vulgar. Wrong. But he'd justified it. Told himself it was necessary
He wouldn't do it again. Couldn't.
Castiel's vessel had taken the stolen grace just fine. But his essence, whatever part of Castiel made him Castiel, powers or not, rejected it. It recognized the foreignness and writhed inside Jimmy's body to stay separate from it, just as the stolen grace shone and swelled to take up as much space as available.
There was a constant battle inside him between the Grace, which wanted to swallow Castiel whole, and his essence, that claimed the property and wouldn't leave, but also couldn't suffer this foreign Grace to remain. It had been painful and difficult and sucked some of Castiel's concentration away from the tasks at hand, all those months he was looking for Metatron and leading his Flock.
Over time it got easier and at first Castiel didn't know why. And he was busy and exhausted, not like humans are exhausted, but he was soul-tired, focused on his search, and lonely for Dean and Sam. So the reduction in the struggle, the lessened writhing, was welcome. And Castiel didn't question it.
Until Metatron looked him in face and saw right through the lies he'd been telling himself. "How's that, um, stolen grace inside you working out?"
"It's fine"
"No, it's not. It's burning out."
That's when Castiel realized, or maybe accepted, that the reason the struggle was less was not because his essence was getting used to the dead angel's grace. It was because there was simply less grace to get used to. As quickly as a door is opened, Castiel understood. As soon as he stopped lying to himself it was obvious.
This grace couldn't regenerate. Eventually he would run out.
An Angel's grace and their essence are meant to coexist symbiotically, wrapping together like a double helix and pushing and pulling, growing and shrinking, healing each other and getting stronger through the energy of the other and the bond that they share. An angel cannot exist without their essence, and that is what's struck down when their vessel is pierced with an Angel Blade. But, as Castiel had himself experienced, an angel can exist without grace. An angel without grace is almost human and just as mortal.
While a human has both a soul and a mind and can live and be a form of themselves, one without the other, no such separation exists with angels. Essence is essence. It can't be teased out into smaller pieces. The essence flows into a vessel first, bonding every molecule, communicating with every cell, making itself one with the body of the vessel before allowing the grace to enter. It has to. The vessel has to be prepared and strengthened by the essence before the grace can fill it without it exploding or slowly falling to pieces.
An angel's essence is him. It loves it's vessel and it knows its vessel like nothing else can. It is the angel in human form. It's his essence of his being. So when the Grace is gone, the angel can go on being himself, albeit hobbled and powerless and probably feeling empty and confused. But he's still him.
And the essence knows when grace, pouring back into his vessel, expanding to fill the gaps between every particle, ishis grace and when it's wrong.
A wrong grace can be used, it still works, but, as Castiel had felt almost constantly since stealing the grace and getting his power back, it writhes and struggles and it never really feels right.
It also can't regenerate. Use it, it's gone. Whether for healing or destruction, spell-casting or mending a trench coat. Without the connection to the essence, grace, once used, cannot reach out to heaven to be replenished. So it seeps away and flows away, breaks off in chips and chunks.
Maybe it got faster after that, the bleeding out, the using up. Probably he just let himself feel it. Still it didn't stop Castiel from using his powers to help the Winchesters and end Metatron's murderous, manipulative, psychopathic fantasy forever.
Castiel hears footfalls coming from the direction of the kitchen and sits up, turns around, to see Dean walking over, like everything's fine, the necks of two beers in his left hand, already taking a swig from the one in his right.
He sets one of the full beers on the war-room table and slaps one into Castiel's hand.
"Here, Cas," Dean says, with only the the slightest amount of pity in his voice. He sits down next to Castiel and puts his feet up on the table, leaning against the back of the wooden chair and tipping it up on two legs. Dean sighs. What does a sigh mean?
"Sammy!" Dean calls out toward the bedrooms. "Get out here. Your beer's getting warm" Castiel can hear rustling and then a loud yawn from the direction of Sam's room. He must have been asleep.
Sleep. Something Castiel never did for thousands of years. Now he sleeps every night, though not very soundly. All part of being a graceless former angel, he supposes.
Castiel is sure he looks morose and awful, poor posture and staring at the table like that. He feels so strange in the Winchester's clothes.
He expects Dean to make some sort of comment about not being a girl, or to reference a chick flick or teen television program Castiel's behavior is reminding him of. But he doesn't.
Dean just claps him on the back, looks him square in the eyes and says "Glad you decided to stay, man." He raises his beer in Cas' direction before taking another gulp.
Castiel tries to force a small smile, but he's pretty sure it comes out unconvincing. So he slides his beer bottle closer, wrapping both hands around the body of the bottle, feeling the cold, a cold he is no longer immune to, and looks back down at the table. Now Castiel is the one who sighs.
Without straightening up or moving his head, Castiel glances sideways at Dean who is staring right at him, a serious but unreadable expression on his face. When he catches Castiel's eye he turns back toward the hallway.
"Sammy!" Dean barks out again.
Castiel is unsure if Dean is masking his pity, or some other emotion (frustration, maybe?), for Castiel's sake. He wonders if he's even read the inflection and the facial expression right at all. Maybe Dean's angry with him. Maybe he doesn't care or isn't aware. He's not an angel any more. He can't look inside Deans head and know his motivations, his thinking.
Castiel doesn't look away from Dean.
Dean turns back, stares him straight in the eyes and opens his mouth as if to speak.
But Sam's voice is the next one Castiel hears.
"What the hell, Dean, I was taking a nap," Sam says in his usual annoyed tone. But even Castiel can tell it's not real annoyance.
Sam pulls out a chair across from Dean and Castiel and sits down roughly.
"You nap now?" Dean asks, shaking his head.
"So now that you woke me up, you gonna make me go get my own beer?" Either Sam doesn't see the third beer sitting on the table or he's just playing.
"It's right in front of you, jackass,"
Sam makes a small huffing noise through his nose and rolls his eyes in Castiel's direction as he reaches toward the cold drink.
"Jerk"
"Bitch"
It's all just a part of the rhythm of Sam and Dean's relationship. Castiel wonders how - if - he will fit in to that routine.
Castiel straightens up to see Sam with his bottle held out in toast
"To Cas sticking around," He seems to mean it. He's even smiling. Castiel smiles back a little.
"To Cas, and to Team Free Fucking Will," Dean adds. He raises his bottle too. "For once we all made it out alive."
He's right, Cas thinks. He doesn't have his grace. But he has his life, even if it's a human one. He has his friends, scratch that, his family.
The angels are gone. His connection to heaven. All the power and knowledge that once defined him. The love of an absent father he finally has to let go of.
But he has this life. And he has the Winchesters.
So Castiel raises his bottle too, and as the three of them clink their beers together, the sound of glass on glass echoing around the war-room, and takes a drink.
"Amen."