Chapter Text
For someone who had watched humans for over two thousand years, Castiel was pretty clueless when it came to their everyday lives. When he was pushed to Earth, Graceless, he had been too stubborn to admit that he would need food and shelter. He was glad that he had, albeit reluctantly, accepted money from that man, the one in the brown truck that had called him ‘kid’.
The man had almost hit him with the vehicle, but luckily Cas had jumped out of the way. After he fell to Earth, he was in a bit of a panic and he wanted to run- anywhere, and he tried to fly away but he couldn’t. He heard his brothers and sisters screaming from inside his mind- angel radio was still working. The sound was agonizing, and he stopped and tried to cover his ears, but of course that did not help. Nothing was going to help, at least not for a while anyway. Perhaps there was a ‘reset’ button somewhere, but it wasn’t like he could snap his fingers and travel back in time to fix this right away.
The pain that shot through his hands when he fell, skin scraping gravel, was absolutely different from any other pain he had felt before- and he had literally exploded more than once in this vessel. Castiel no longer shared the vessel, as Jimmy Novak was long gone. He wished he could have done more for James, but the man was aware of the sacrifices that had to be made. At least he hadn’t been around to see Cas fall too far. He could only imagine the disappointment that would be on Jimmy’s face if he saw him now.
Castiel attempted to assess the situation, but he was more worried about his siblings and Dean and Sam than himself. He hadn’t fully thought about what it meant that his Grace was gone, and so he didn’t yet realize that he couldn’t just make the trucker using the payphone fall asleep by a touch to the forehead. Cas did not have his head wrapped around the fact that he would have to eat and drink and walk everywhere that he wanted to go.
Of course, that pain in his hand was long forgotten once his newly reintroduced sister, Hael, had hit him over the head with a wooden two by four about an hour later. He woke up in a green Subaru that she had stolen. It was a shame that he had no other choice but to protect himself and crash the vehicle to get away from her- that hurt too. Though he buckled up, the speed and impact in which the car hit the tree had caused him to pass out. He awoke to find that Hael had flown through the windshield, and glass had flown back at him. He wished he didn’t have to kill her; but she had threatened to tell the others where he was, to turn him in. She said she needed his vessel, and if he didn’t let her take control of it, then she would let them know that he was in the area. Sometimes, he thought, his family was much more stubborn than demons.
Speaking of demons and his family, he had a feeling he would continue to be on the run for a while. Angels would be chasing him both because of the strength of his vessel and the blame of The Fall being placed almost exclusively on him. Demons had never been much of an issue for him before, but now that he was human he certainly couldn’t protect himself as easily against them. He still knew things that they wouldn’t mind trying to torture out of him.
He found somewhere where he could go wash Hael’s and his own blood off of his coat. Laundromats: such odd little places where different people from many walks of life go to clean their clothes. Angels didn’t even wear clothes, at least not in any similar sense. Clothes were a strictly human thing, going back to some of the first ancestors of humans. Clothing meant protection, but in much more recent years clothing meant modesty. Nakedness was distasteful in modern society- so much that newer versions of The Holy Bible claimed that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they learned that being naked was just as terrible as sinning. Reproductive organs, especially, had to be covered. Castiel had not had the chance to feel shy about his own vessel’s body, and therefore it wasn’t odd for him to strip down to wash his clothes… he had both washed his clothes and himself the old fashioned way a few times before, such as when he was Emanuel. Hell, he had been found naked wandering along a river when he was Emanuel. That felt like so long ago at this point, as if it was another lifetime.
That was the third time that Castiel had run into Meg. Things were a bit fuzzy during it all, to say the least. He had tried everything he could to fight off the Leviathans, the old monsters, but they had torn him apart. He thought he was gone for good that time, and yet he was reborn into this vessel again, picking the name Emanuel from the BouncingBabyNames.com website. He married the woman that had found him, Daphne Allen. That was probably a bit of a rushed thing now that he thought about it.
When he saw Meg, he saw this demon’s true face, but there was something different- she wanted to take care of him. She wanted him to remember who he was. Perhaps it was for selfish reasons, yes, but then again, even angels themselves didn’t do things unless they received some sort of benefit. It was only humans that sometimes, though very rarely, did certain things and expected nothing in return. That was why Castiel cared about them so much.
But, this demon, though her true face was scarred and frightening and bony, was better at explaining things to him than anyone else had ever been. She was the first one to tell him that he was an angel. He didn’t understand her at first- he thought she was flirting with him (which, for once, she wasn’t), but once he walked up to fight the demons outside of the asylum, his memories began flooding back. He remembered every terrible detail; Sam was in there, and it was all Castiel’s fault. He had to make it right somehow. The only thing he could do was transfer Sam’s hallucinations to himself, but… even now, he didn’t regret that. Even now, he would always take the blow for the Winchesters.
The Laundromat was painted a bright and cheerful yellow and blue as if that would make it less drab. There were a few vending machines nearby, but Cas had just glanced them over at first. When he went to put in the coins to wash his coat, however, was when he first experienced real hunger. This was not like his run-in with Famine, because that had strictly been his vessel craving red meat. He felt thirsty this time too; that was what really got to him. It pained him to have to give in and buy himself something to eat and drink, because it truly meant that he really was no longer an angel. He knew he actually wasn’t human either, because he did not have a soul. Castiel was something in between the two.
He found a pile of clothes that someone had long since left behind, and picked out some items in it that would suffice to protect him from the chill at night and the grime of the daytime. As he dressed in these new garments, Castiel could not help but wonder how things had gone so wrong, and he blamed himself more than anyone. He had been in the process of forgiving himself for his past actions, and now of course this whole thing with the angels falling had to happen. He wasn’t sure what to do except to try and contact the one person that he had left to trust aside from the Winchesters: Meg. If he used her nickname for him- Clarence- then she was bound to catch on if she was close by. After all, she must have been looking for him since their run in with the tablets, right?
He tried to remember everything that had happened then, but since he had fought away Naomi’s mind control and then ran off with the angel tablet, he really had no idea where Meg had gone. Still, he had to wonder that, if they had stayed together, what the outcome would have been? They had a long, complicated history together, but Cas had these feelings that were even more amplified now that he was flesh and bone.