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When Castiel selected Jimmy Novak as his vessel, he was more concerned with the man’s faith than anything else. He needed someone who was willing to give everything for him, because there was every chance that everything would need to be given.
As devout as he was, Jimmy seemed shocked that he had been chosen.
“You...you know what kind of man I am, don’t you?”
“I know everything about you,” Castiel told him, speaking through the television. This wasn’t strictly true, at least not until Jimmy consented and Castiel entered his body. Then, he did know everything.
He knew that Jimmy Novak had an irrational fear of cats.
He knew that Jimmy Novak was cast out by his parents.
He knew that Jimmy Novak met his wife at a bar and wooed her by pretending he knew how to Salsa dance when, in fact, he did not.
He knew that Jimmy had given birth to Claire himself, a year before he met Amelia.
He knew that Jimmy volunteered regularly at his church.
These details presented themselves to Castiel as individual stars in the sweep of the sky. It would be a long time before they began to form anything like constellations. It wouldn’t be until he had lived in Jimmy’s body as a human that he would begin to understand that Jimmy was a perfect vessel for him, in more ways than one.
***
When Castiel learned that Jimmy was a type of person reviled by most of the followers of his very own sect of Christianity, he became curious. He had slipped into a church service in search of solace, certain that if he could see these humans, who had no proof of the divine, remaining unshaken in their faith, it would shore up his own. What he witnessed instead was a man railing against “deviants.” He spoke of sodomites and men pretending to be women. He whipped his congregation into a frenzy of hate that drove Castiel back out onto the street.
His body— his vessel— trembled.
Vessels, Castiel knew, did this sometimes. They retained something of their muscle memory, and reacted in response to stimuli that would otherwise have no effect on the angel inhabiting them. Except the sermon did have an effect on Castiel. Sensing Jimmy’s reaction to the sermon was like looking in the mirror: there was a man who grew up steeped in faith, only to realize there was no room for his truth in the unshakable gospel.
And yet Jimmy was more faithful than any human in that hateful church. He had been turned away not once but many times, and still he returned, still he sought God, still he opened himself to an angel of the Lord. Was this bravery, or was it a form of self hatred?
***
Dean Winchester was a maddening human. It wasn’t just that Castiel didn’t understand his pop culture references. It was that he did not understand the weight behind his words, what one might call connotation or history or culture or baggage. When Castiel made statements he considered perfectly innocuous, Dean recoiled or laughed. When Castiel made a joke, Dean looked at him as if he had spontaneously generated a second head. Castiel was missing something.
He was missing something in other areas as well. He did not consider the body he occupied to be fundamentally different from any other body. The differences among humans, he had always believed, were superficial at best. There were words to describe his body, many of them, and none seemed weightier than any other.
“Transgender.” Castiel had known this word, the same way he knew the words “accountant” and “bulldozer” and “clumsy.” He understood the mechanics of the phenomena such words described, but not what they meant. Not how they operated in their deeply enmeshed contexts.
And then he was human, and building his own baggage from scratch.
He learned what it meant to “itch” and “ache” and “thirst.” He learned “clumsy” and “mortified” as a horrible, electric blue, icy sludge poured from a broken machine, soaking his work uniform. He learned a kind of “want” that was entirely detached from logic, that resided in an ache behind his sternum. He learned “lonely.”
He also learned that his body meant things— things he had never considered. When he was unclean and unshaven, strangers reacted to him with scorn and fear. When he donned his Gas-n-Sip uniform, he became invisible. And when he stripped down to his underwear in a laundromat, strangers stared at the scars on his chest.
A woman he met when he was sleeping in the cold recognized something about him— about Jimmy— about the body that was now his.
“Me too,” she said, and at first, Castiel was confused.
“You are an angel?” he said.
The woman laughed and called him a charmer. “Do you have a way to get your hormones?” she asked, and Castiel understood.
There was more to add to the unending list of maintenance his body required. Urination, sustenance, water, teeth cleaning, hair removal, warmth. Hormones. He had no way to access them.
“Me neither,” the woman said. She sounded desolate, and Castiel offered to hold her hand. Another form of maintenance their bodies required: touch.
In the months of his humanity, Castiel’s body changed. He grew tired and weak— though he barely noticed, as the effects of hunger and humanity were more pressing. His stomach and arms grew softer, and his hair began to thin. The body Castiel had held in stasis was beginning to react to the absence of the testosterone it had grown accustomed to.
Castiel learned how hard Jimmy had worked to shape his body. To create himself. He began to crave the body that he had once treated as nothing more than a suit. He craved the balance of it more than any of its physical traits. The rightness of it. He began to save what money he could, knowing only that hormones cost money. If he could not have his grace, he would need his hormones.
He felt a deep kinship with Jimmy, whose memories still lingered in his mind. A teenager who slept on the couches of friends, who dreamed of a body re-imagined as Castiel now dreamed of angeldom. Jimmy was gone now, but not really. A human was a body as much as a soul, and this body was Castiel’s, and it was Jimmy’s, and their wants had become so intertwined Castiel could never be sure where one began and the other ended.
Perhaps that was an irrelevant question. If he had once been something else, he was no longer, and never would be again. Even if he became an angel once more, he would never be the angel he had been.
He dreamed of a voice saying his name.
“Cas.”
Just that, and nothing more. It warmed him to the depths of his soul, but he woke up cold.
***
Cas wasn’t sure when Dean first knew the truth about his body. He probably pieced it together over the years, from glimpsing Cas without his shirt, from snippets of things Cas said. Cas was never trying to hide it, but it never seemed relevant to disclose. There was much Dean didn’t know about Jimmy. Why should he care about this?
But of course that wasn’t true, because Jimmy’s trans body was Cas’s trans body. Even as an angel again, he would never go back to being entirely detached from the body he occupied. As the angel Castiel, he had thought of gender as a categorization system devised by humans, mostly irrelevant. But oh, it was so much more than that. It was embodied sensation. It was to be seen and named, it was to present and name oneself. It was to seek harmony between the yearnings of the internal and the limits of the external, and to live in the cracks between, to mold oneself out of frustrated desire. It was to shape oneself and be shaped. In becoming human, Castiel had become a man, a man who wanted another man.
“Does this make it easier or harder for you?” Cas asked, after he told Dean that he was trans, turning what was known and unspoken into a spoken truth. Dean sat on a stool in the Bunker’s kitchen, Cas standing an awkward distance away, afraid to come too close.
Dean shook his head. “I don’t know. Both? Neither?”
He was clearly in turmoil, as he so often was. Cas understood many of the sources of this turmoil: Dean’s internalized homophobia, Dean’s deep-rooted certainty in his own worthlessness, Dean’s fear of loss that made him cling and push away in equal measure. But he was sure there was more that he didn’t understand, more that would always be a mystery to him because Dean was and always had been more complicated than Cas could ever understand. Where Cas lived millenia with words and no context, Dean had lived his life steeped in meaning with no words. The things he feared and hoped for were pre-verbal. He struggled to unlearn that which he could not remember learning.
Dean had not chosen to be a man, not like Jimmy had, not like Cas had. And yet he had constructed his manhood just as painstakingly. Cas had heard people— angels and demons and humans alike— wonder if there was anything beneath the construction. Cas knew there was. He had seen it, had held it in his hands. If it had gender, Cas did not know. But it had love and a need for love, it had beauty, it had tenderness. And it was visible in Dean, shining through if you knew where to look.
“So you have, you know…?” Dean gestured vaguely to Castiel’s body.
Castiel had prepared himself for invasive questions. “Are you asking about my genitals, Dean?”
Dean flushed deep red. “No, dude. I mean— don’t make it weird.”
“I am willing to share that information if it is relevant to you,” Cas said. “Is it relevant?”
Dean swallowed visibly. “I don’t know,” he said. “Do you— want it to be?”
“I love you,” Cas said. It was growing easier to say it by the day, now that he knew Dean would not cast him aside for it, now that Dean had saved him from the Empty even knowing this fact. “I want you in many ways. But most of all, I want your honesty. I want to know if you love me, and how you love me. I would never resent what I can not have. But I don’t think honesty is too much to ask for.”
Dean rubbed at his face and ran a hand through his hair, mussing all his careful styling. “Cas, what I feel— I don’t—”
He did not have the words, Cas knew. He was prepared to accept that; he had known this would most likely be the case.
But Dean surprised him.
“I care about you in a way I’ve never cared about anyone else,” he said. It was almost a growl. “I didn’t think I was— whatever that is. But fuck, I’m ready to be surprised. I always thought I knew exactly who I was, and look where that got me. To hell and back. So— so fuck it, right?”
He looked up at Cas, clearly seeking approval, as if this were some kind of test and he wanted, so badly, to give the right answer.
Cas broke into a smile, the kind that made his face ache. “Dean, I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear you say that.”
A smile tugged at the corners of Dean’s lips. “Yeah?”
“Yes.”
Cas stepped forward, and this felt more natural, more familiar, being in Dean’s space. Dean pushed himself off the stool and stood. They were chest to chest, and Cas was now the one looking up into Dean’s eyes.
“Okay,” Dean said hazily.
He leaned in and kissed Castiel on the mouth. Castiel’s body came alive, a symphony of sensation. It sang in a way it never had. He let impulse guide him, dragging his hands over Dean’s ribs and up to cup his cheeks, kissing him back with hunger and he was clumsy and he didn’t care.
It went on for a long time. When they broke apart, both breathless, Dean said,
“For the record, I think this would have happened in whatever meatsuit you had.”
Cas found himself recoiling at that. He knew Dean meant it kindly, that he cared for who Cas was and not what he looked like. But there was something wrong.
“This is not my meatsuit,” Cas said. “This is my body.”
Dean frowned. “What’s the difference?”
“The difference is everything. The difference is I want you to love me for this, for my self and my body. Not in pieces.”
“I mean, yeah, if you suddenly showed up in a different body, I’d be freaked. I’m just saying— I don’t want you to think I wouldn’t still, y’know.” He gestured between them.
“Would you prefer a different body for me? If it had been the first body you knew, would you want it to be different?”
A woman. A cisgender man. Someone who looked like one of the actors in Dean’s favorite movies. Someone whose body hadn’t borne a child. Someone who was not scarred. Cas had always struggled to evaluate his own appearance, and he had never experienced insecurity in his looks. But now he felt something like misery.
“Dude, no,” Dean said. “That’s what I’m trying to say. I like this, okay? I like you . If you were different, you wouldn't be you. I like— I want—” He threw up his hands. “You get it, right?”
And Cas smiled, a weight lifting from him. “Yes, I think I do.”
***
Later, when they held each other in Dean’s bed, drawing warmth from bare skin and soft fabric, Dean spoke in the darkness.
“That thing you said, about a body being different from a meatsuit.”
“Yes?”
Dean was silent for a moment. “What does that feel like?”
Cas placed a hand on Dean’s sternum. He could feel his heartbeat, steady and slow. “In a vessel, the desires and needs of the body are suppressed. It moves and speaks and does what is asked of it, but if it cries out, no one hears it.”
This was how it was supposed to be, but Cas had always doubted that this was entirely true. He remembered Jimmy’s impulses making themselves known, even in the beginning.
“If you exist in a body, if it is your own, it speaks to you,” Cas went on. “You have needs, and you care for them. You have wants, and you seek to satisfy them. The physical is a part of you, it feeds you, it is you.”
Dean drew in a shuddering breath beneath Cas’s hand.
“I want to feel like that someday,” he murmured, so quiet Cas barely caught the words.
Cas pulled himself entirely on top of Dean’s body, pressing their bare chests together, letting his weight sink into Dean.
“You will,” he said into Dean’s ear. “I promise you, my love, you will.”