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He’s been to Hell, had his wings burned and his grace scorched by the fires, but this is somehow worse.
He’s not on a mission, there is no set path, and there is no goal. No reward at the end. (Not the extra pair of wings he’d been granted for pulling the righteous man out of the Pit; no, he’d never wanted those. The reward turned out to be the man himself.)
He spends his time dodging through trees, and the first time the coat snags on a branch and rips he thinks he feels sad, but leviathan are on the hunt and he has no time for any thought save draw them away from Dean. He’ll bundle his grace up tight, hide it away, and then let it flow to his finger tips and toes in a quick hot burst when he can barely feel Dean, because Purgatory warps even that tenuous thread. And they’ll come, swarming to him, and he runs, safe in the knowledge that even now, even here, he is keeping Dean safe.
And it only hurts a little when they taunt him. “Where’s your righteous man, angel?” they say, and he runs with their promises of torture and pain fading in the wind, and wonders how they know that threats to Dean affect him more than threats to himself.
His wings are of no use; he’s back down to two anyways.
He welcomes all of it, from the blood and pain to the scratching annoyance of a new beard, atonement for the horrors he’d committed. A thousand years here couldn’t be enough to balance out those scales. But for now, Dean needs him still, and he does his best.
The smallest part of him wonders if, when Dean is free of this place, he can let the leviathan come and take whatever part of him is left, and he will finally know peace. He wonders too where he will go; once, he had let himself dream again of Heaven, and his brothers, and maybe even Dean and Sam, when it was their time. He’d thought maybe of showing Dean what music the Host could make, showing him the gilded cities, and the garden and the Tree. Now he contents himself with the thought that Dean will still see these places, will be able to walk the streets of Heaven and languish beneath the tree; but the thought of him doing it alone, however comforting, still steals all of his breath from his chest.
He knows, now, what he feels. He knew then, maybe, but Dean had said, “We don’t talk about it, Cas,” and he’d mistakenly equated sex with love, and thought we don’t talk about love. He knows better, knew better, but still never said anything. He hopes Dean knows though.
Five months in he can feel his grace waning, growing weaker, the thread connecting him to Dean along with it. He pushes himself as far away from Dean as he can and lets his grace out in a burst of energy and heat, and he can feel the leviathan crowding in, eager to catch and tear.
He miscalculates how the almost complete loss of his most vital being will affect him, and he loses half of his left wing for it, torn off and ripped away in the scramble for his life, or what remains of it.
He manages, for a while, and is oddly thankful for his meager remaining Grace. He runs his had continuously over the place where his wing now ends, the abrupt edge disarming him every time, and fights to feel the thread to Dean again, but there’s nothing. He thinks about something Dean had said once, about picking at a scab when the wound isn’t healed, and when he gets dizzy and feint from trying to force the connection, he thinks it’s something similar.
It’s been eight months and three days when he feels the connection strengthen into something almost tangible, and he kneels by the river, thrusting his hands into the icy water as the once-familiar feeling overwhelms him and leaves him gasping. He pulls his coat tight to him and hears the unmistakable footsteps behind him, the ones he knows well from hunts through quiet forests, and he supposes that’s the only way Dean walks now.
His name, the one he should hate in all its shortened, terrible glory, rings out, and despite himself he grows warm, and Dean’s name spills from his lips.
His righteous man is dirty, and bloody, and tired, and beautiful. Dean rushes at him and for a single moment Castiel thinks he’s going to get punched again, because surely Dean blames him, but instead he is surrounded, and he wonders if Dean knows that this is the first time someone has hugged him and meant it.
A year ago he would have gripped just as tightly back, but as he feels Dean clench his fist in his coat his own hand mirrors the movement at his side; he can’t, he won’t, now. He lets his eyes slip closed and for a moment forgets it all except for the warmth of the arms around him in this cold place.
He means to say no, to run away again, but he finds himself following Dean and his new brother, and bites his tongue, stems the flow of words he wants to say.
Benny calls him Cas, and the wrongness of it burns him every time, but he says nothing. Benny says to Dean, “your angel,” and Castiel is okay with this. He is Dean’s.
He tries to say goodbye without words, makes excuses about the portal, because he knows that when Dean leaves, he will stay.
And he does, when Dean tries to pull him forward, grips his hand and makes the promise never to leave him behind. He goes against everything in him and pushes Dean away, because he still deserves this. And as the portal swirls closed, Dean’s last shout echoing through the trees, he feels wet on his face, and he wonders if this is how it feels to die.