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It was easy to fall for Dean Winchester.
He was new, bright and felt everything so strongly. Emotions that you only knew by name, until Dean. Through him you learned guilt, betrayal, hurt, friendship and love.
He stopped the apocalypse and sang along poorly to his father’s old cassette tapes. He died countless times but never forgot about you. Even if you forgot about him just for a moment.
For your brothers and sisters it was difficult to imagine how a human could take hold of you so quickly. You had survived eons as a warrior of God, serving without question. But the moment you felt the flare of Dean’s soul in Hell, you began to wonder.
In the grand scheme of things, it took the blink of an eye for the friendship to form between the two of you. But in reality, it felt much, much longer. He was suspicious and you were losing the only direction you had ever had since Creation. It seemed for every step forward, there would be three steps back. It should have frustrated you, made you seek a new charge, but it didn’t. There was only Dean.
Eventually you earned his trust, and the trust of his brother. Which was just as important in his eyes.
Things started to change after that, you could not place it, but sometimes you caught Sam staring at you with a look of wonder. You reasoned that he was still coming to terms with the fact that you were a celestial being with strength and power he could only dream of. You were wrong.
“Don’t take everything he says so seriously, Cas.” He said one night when Dean was out of the motel. “He wouldn’t keep you around if he didn’t like you.”
“I don’t understand.” You said, and you didn’t. You wouldn’t until the night seventeen months later when you had been cut off from Heaven. It had been hard for you. You had felt the drain of power, but you had never felt this weak in your entire existence. Although you would never admit it, you feared that once you were human the Winchesters, Dean, would leave you. Forget you.
It was easy to fall in love with Dean Winchester.
Like nothing else in your lives, falling in love was easy. Comfortable. Both warriors, soldiers, men of their word.
Falling in love snuck up on you. It took your brother to point it out.
“You really bagged yourself a winner there, lil bro. Got a mouth on him, but he’s handsome for sure.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Gabriel.” But you were starting to. You saw the way that Dean looked at you, and the guilt he felt almost immediately after. And you knew the way your grace burned when he prayed to you alone.
He kissed you for the first time after a hunt outside of the Impala. He was warm and soft. You were woefully inexperienced. He didn’t mind, though.
“It’s okay, Cas. We have a lot of time to practice.” And you did. For humans.
It was impossible to say good bye to Dean Winchester.
Like everything else about him, his death was unusual. He didn’t die of a heart attack like Sam predicted and he didn’t die at the hands of a monster like he did. And he didn’t live forever like you had hoped. He had cancer. Something so utterly and completely human, it blindsided everyone.
It didn’t take long for him to go, less than a year. You had fallen decades before, and the angels weren’t listening to the prayers of a couple old hunters and an ex-angel.
He was 78 and looked it. His knees were worn, his back went out every other day and his hair had long gone white. But he was still Dean Winchester, the man you pulled from the depths of Hell to save the world.
You supposed Jimmy would have been around Dean’s age, but you didn’t look it. Jimmy had left his body behind on Earth when you became human. But as Dean said you must have had some ‘angel mojo’ left, because you aged more slowly than the Winchesters. You looked years younger than Sam when Dean got sick.
Dean made you promise before he passed that you wouldn’t do anything stupid to try to meet him in Heaven any faster and you weren’t supposed to listen to Sam because you would die a girl and then what was Dean supposed to do with you?
You agreed and let him go. As it turned out, you weren’t far behind him. Sam, when he joined the two of you twelve years later said that you had died of a broken heart. You didn’t disagree.