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In a bunker under the ground in Kansas, USA, there was an angel cooking dinner.
He wasn’t alone: beside him, hips swinging slightly off-beat to the pop song playing through his headphones, a man was stirring a pot of sauce. Castiel watched him for a moment out of the corner of his eye, before reaching out and pulling a large zucchini towards himself across the counter. The chopping board was already laid out. Cas picked up his kitchen knife and began to slice.
The zucchini split easily under the sharpness of the blade, forming thin rings of light flesh surrounded by dark skin. As he chopped, chopped, chopped, Cas unconsciously matched the rhythm of the bass beating in Dean’s ears, audible across the short distance between them. He finished one zucchini, and reached for a second. Beside him, Dean glanced over at his handiwork and made a face. Cas half-smiled at Dean’s obvious distaste; he shared it, though for quite a different reason, he suspected. Looking down at the green vegetable, Cas gave it a scowl of his own. He disliked green.
Green was the colour of waiting.
That wouldn’t make much sense to Dean, Cas knew. Human thoughts were all synapse and staccato words. Each emotion was a strange mixture of physical sensation and half-formed sentences, incoherent, one-dimensional. Cas might have been in a human vessel, but he still thought as an angel: in wavelengths, short and long, from quiet gamma to blaring, bleeding-ear radio. And in the middle, the visible spectrum. Colour.
When Cas thought about Dean, he thought about waiting. And he thought about it in shades of green.
Green was the centre of the spectrum; the average, the enduring, the baseline. The closed-up bud, waiting to bloom. The bottle-glass wave, not yet edged in froth and broken. Green was not loud, or powerful, or terrible. Green was simply – green. The colour of waiting.
For humans, waiting was normal, of course. A human spent most of eternity in utter stillness, either as-yet unmade or in the process of being unmade once more; dust you are, and to dust you shall return. They had a tiny window of activity – and even that was mostly spent standing still, letting the world bounce sights and sounds and smells through their frail, decomposing bodies. Humans were the audience of the universe. For such creatures, waiting was no hardship; it was a way of being.
But Castiel had ricocheted off stars, had destroyed worlds, had vibrated through the thinnest spread of atoms at the outside of space. He’d been a messenger, humming light and sound into darkened, silent places. He’d been a warrior, unmaking his enemies’ very essence with a note that split their elements asunder. He had been pure action, untainted causation, savage intent with no concept of wait, pause, stop. For a wavelength, there is no standing still. To wait is to collapse out of existence.
Cas looked over at Dean, his hips still moving, whole body swaying. He was wearing a loose white t-shirt, his hair sticking up on one side and his cheeks softened by stubble. His jeans sat a little low on his hips, as he wasn’t wearing a belt. As Cas watched, Dean dipped a spoon into his pot of bubbling sauce and raised it to his lips, furrowing his brow as he tasted it. After a moment, he licked his lips and swallowed.
It was at times like this that Cas very, very much wished that he were still entirely an angel. Still incapable of waiting, still unable to hold steady when he wanted so much to move, to reach out, to touch – Dean spun on his socked feet, turning to pick up the salt and shaking a little into the pot. Cas swallowed hard, and looked back down at the green zucchini on his chopping board.
He hadn’t always been good at waiting. But he had learned.
It was Dean who had taught him, Cas knew. He remembered the time that he had been completely human; with his grace lost, he had been forced to think using his vessel’s rudimentary electrical system. It should have taught him a lesson in slowness, in patience. But Cas found that it was a lesson he had already learned, and a hundred times over: he was a master of patience, of waiting. With Dean, he had never been able to have what it was that he wanted – because of bad timing, because of uncertainty, because of circumstance. It had taught him self-control in the face of terrible longing. For millennia before meeting Dean, Cas had thought along the spectrum, up and down, emotionless and unimaginative. Now, he thought in masterpieces – in soaring could be’s and maybe’s and one day’s – and his palette was in shades of green, the colour of waiting.
Sometimes, he had other things on his mind. Cas’ thoughts burned infrared with thoughts of his fading grace, and his mind was all blue and ultraviolet when he did something right – or when he cooked, or when he and Sam worked on research as a team and he could allow himself to believe, just for a while, that they could win their fight against time. But always, always, there was green, veining through the other colours like lifeblood. It was his bedrock, his baseline.
“Deep thoughts?” Dean said, startling Cas out of his reverie. He’d slid his headphones off his ears, and they sat encircling his neck. He was watching Cas with his eyebrows raised. “That’s a hell of a frown you got there.”
Dean’s eyes were wide and expectant and bright, bright green. For a moment, Cas allowed himself to simply stare and be stared at, submerging himself in the sensation, in the colour. Would it always be this way? Would they always be caught on either side of a divide, waiting, waiting, waiting for the other to move? But no, surely not – that was impossible, because – because green wasn’t only the colour of waiting, Cas thought, suddenly. It was also the colour of promise. Buds always come to bloom. Waves always roll and break. Green wasn’t a stasis, it was an expectation of change… green was the universe’s pledge to its audience that new times would come. Green was Dean patting him on the shoulder, and letting his hand linger. Green was the words they wanted to say into the silence, broken-up and asking, asking, asking. Green was the look in Dean’s eyes, his green, green eyes, when he saw Cas. When he watched Cas. When he stared at Cas.
“Cas?” Dean said, and Cas blinked.
“I was just thinking,” Cas said slowly, “that I like the colour green.” He picked up the zucchini and waved it solemnly.
Dean focused on it for a second, before looking back up to Cas’ face with a frown, evidently wondering if Cas were teasing him.
“Green’s OK,” Dean said. “Blue’s better.”
He turned back to his sauce, stirring it around and around, waiting for it to cook. Cas repressed a sigh, and continued chopping up the zucchini.
One day, Dean’s hand would rest on his shoulder for a moment, and then a moment more, and a moment more. One day, the net of silverfish words between them would be torn down, and all the things they’d been wanting to say would slip easily through the space between them. One day, Dean’s eyes would look at Cas and instead of saying wait, wait, wait, they’d say now, now, now. One day. Cas burned for it, felt his human body aching and hollowed out with need – but for now, the promise would see him through. For now, green was enough.
Cas pushed the sliced green zucchini towards Dean with the flat of his knife, and reached for another.
For now, he would wait.