Chapter Text
The sun is shining when Castiel opens his eyes.
He is in a field. It’s been years since he has found himself here, and never in this season, but Castiel recognizes it nonetheless: the tall grass, and the wildflowers in their death throes, and the sound of the brook which runs behind a windmill wheeling gently in the breeze behind him.
And the headstone. Castiel, it says, just that—just his name, carved in a piece of sandstone with a shaking hand. It was clean and clear the last time Castiel woke up here, nestled in a patch of tall grass that had been gently cleared, but it’s half overgrown now moss and chicory and ivy, and Castiel would have missed it if he hadn’t been looking.
This is where Dean spread his ashes after Lucifer killed him. This is where Castiel first came back, this place with the windmill and the flowers and the sun. This place that, Dean told him once, drunk enough that his eyes got soft and his cheeks got dark and his mouth trembled, he picked out especially for Cas.
Castiel breathes in deeply. As much as the gesture made him love Dean even, impossibly more, he dearly hopes to never have to wake up here again.
It smells of wild grass and lavender here in the daylight, in the sunshine, in the world of the living. It’s autumn, if the burnished state of the trees and the chill that works itself beneath the flaps of his coat is anything to go by, but he doesn’t know if it’s the first autumn that has passed since the Empty collected him, or if it’s the third, the fifth, the seventh. He doesn’t know how long he’s been gone.
Castiel breathes in, and then he exhales, and then—and then it hits him.
The longing. Dean’s longing, unmistakeable to Castiel after these long years, though more painful now than Castiel has ever felt it. It wraps like a boney first around Castiel’s heart and squeezes. It wants to send Castiel to his knees.
Castiel says his name out loud. It’s the first word he’s spoken since the Empty shrouded him in its slumber, and it brings tears to his eyes.
Castiel must go to him. Castiel must go home.
But he will not go empty-handed.
*
His wings are fully restored now, healthy and strong as they haven’t been in nearly a decade. It is like stretching after a years-long nap when he unfulrs them. It is like speaking his first word after an interminable silence. It is like dawn after the end of the world.
Nobody notices when he lands in the abandoned aisle of a supermarket, fluorescent lights flickering like a lightning storm above him.
Castiel knows exactly what he is looking for, which is a very good thing: the longing Dean feels for him has grown to a wail, a fever pitch, closing up Castiel’s throat and setting his heart to beating. He sorts through a tower of green apples with deliberation, harvesting those that feel firm and smooth in his hand, no bruises marring their shiny flesh. He finds flour and butter and sugar. He allows a young mother into line before him even though the ache inside himself is a bruise, and he does not rush the cashier ringing up his purchases even though he wants nothing more than to scoop up his things and fly to Dean with only a beat of his wings.
Castiel is reminded of another time he went shopping, of gripping the clerk with both fists and demanding pie with the wrath of the Holy Host in his voice—but Castiel is a different man, now. A gentler one. Castiel has learned patience.
Castiel steps into the shadowed parking lot, and Castiel closes his eyes, and Castiel goes to him.
With a grocery bag hanging from either hand, he lands on the front steps of a cabin in the woods.
Castiel’s heart beats, and beats, and the longing has welled up in his throat like the flood, and he can feel Dean on the other side of this door. He can feel him. Shining like the North Star.
Castiel knocks.