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There’s a million different versions of this scene, the card table, Castiel’s frayed white scrubs, the box of the board game. I Hate You, for ages 12 and up, this box says. Castiel remembers other boxes from other scenes: Screwed Up, a Milton-Bradley game; You Couldn’t Fix This, a real-time puzzler. Dean is always here, sitting across from him. Dean knocks the table over, he knocks the gameboard off, he storms out, he hits Castiel, he hugs Castiel. Castiel is tired of this scene. The boxes are never right, and it’s some kind of insanity that has him hoping the next one will tell him what it is he actually wants to say. It’s not Sorry. Maybe it’s Forgive Me, or Can We Ever Get Over This, or I’m Not Taking The Fall. Though that last one wouldn’t be right, either, Castiel knows. I’m Taking the Fall but I Wish You’d Admit Some Fault As Well. Too long for a game box, so that one’s not going to happen either. Castiel can waste all his time coming up with these, because the scene isn’t going anywhere. He can walk into any other scenes he wants, this one is always waiting for him.
~~~
“Do you think you really were sorry?”
Castiel watches the woman pick her fingers with a knife. She is blonde, athletic-looking, dirty in the dim light. They’re in a basement somewhere. It’s possible Castiel has been here before. He’s lived many lives.
“When I’m tired of arguing, I always just say what they want to hear,” she continues.
He doesn’t speak to her. She reminds him of no one at all.
“Is that what you fell for? So you could go around apologizing?”
He leaves this one early. He doesn’t much care for it.
~~~
They’re younger in this one, and somehow Castiel isn’t an angel, and he and Dean are the same age, are living in the same town in the same time. The young Castiel looks like Jimmy but he talks like Castiel, like even among the humans he never learned to be normal. Dean presses him down into the grass in the dark glow of the streetlights, and Castiel knows his shirt must be wet with dew but he has never been happier. Fuck, I want you, Dean whispers into his ear, and it’s simple and vulgar and Castiel has never heard anything in Enochian or Swahili or all the languages of the earth that compares to it.
~~~
In this one it’s Dean who’s the angel, and his wings are beautiful. He saves Castiel from hell, or maybe earth, it isn’t clear. When Castiel is given his wings back, he promises never to disobey again, and he thinks he might even mean it. There is no glorification of humanity in this one, just heaven and perfection and eternity, and Castiel is rather relieved.
~~~
“This is a punishment, you know. But not for you.”
Castiel wonders if she’s followed him to this one, or if he keeps drifting into hers. The basement is gone, replaced with an empty road somewhere in the country. It’s gravel and the dust makes Castiel cough.
“It’s not about you. It never was.”
He lowers himself down to sit on the sharp rocks and she folds herself up beside him, hands around her knees.
“Tell me about the last one. Was it nice?”
Castiel begins to speak. His voice sounds foreign to him, though it is his true one.
~~~
In this one they’re both women, and Dean is too hot for her own good, golden-haired and cutoff jeans, like something from a country song, climbing out of the Impala with legs for days. She puts on her personality like a show, presents people with the Winchester she thinks they’ll enjoy, dances with the scrawnier Castiel while they watch, mock-sexy. When she kisses Castiel, though, it’s just for them, nobody watching. Her fingers are rough when they hold Castiel, when they bend and push inside her.
~~~
“Everyone thinks if you treat your charges like shit you won’t get attached. Rookie mistake. Anger is a feeling. You don’t want those.”
Castiel and the woman are in a municipal building of some kind. Concrete, grey and brown, so dully functional it makes Castiel hurt to look at it.
“The trick is to condescend. Patronize. Don’t give them an opportunity to be equal with you.”
“I never understood humans.” Castiel says. “Thousands of years of innovation and culture and achievement, and they go and build something like this.”
“I should write a manual. Keeping Your Distance: A Guide to Human Charges.”
“Angels don’t have manuals.”
“Just the one.”
They both lean against an off-white desk and stare at the empty waiting room.
The woman flicks a metal pen chain back and forth. “If I’d written the Bible, I wouldn’t have written it.”
~~~
In this one Dean is insane. He kills innocents and enjoys causing pain. He paints himself in the blood of his victims and Sam is his willing accomplice, driving cross-country in a spree of murders. In this one Castiel is just a man, and he wants so badly for Dean to corrupt him, to carve something meaningful into his flesh. Dean wrings pain out of his soul and he thinks, yes, yes, just like that. The blood is beautiful, and it covers Castiel and he is beautiful with it.
~~~
“No species would evolve to feel romantic love. Attachment, yes. To form long-term pair bonds. It benefits the offspring. Or familial love, which places the needs of your progeny over your own, thus ensuring the survival of your genes.” She kicks dirt ahead of her with the toe of her boots. The path through these woods is dry and dusty. The place is aching for rain.
Castiel listens to her talk. There used to be all this silence in his head. He’s not sure he likes what she replaces it with.
“Romantic love doesn’t benefit the offspring. It tears people apart, it makes people do dangerous things; it threatens the well-being of offspring and parents alike. So we conclude that love is the by-product. Attachment evolved, and love happened to tag along with it.”
Insects are making noise in the trees. A plague of locusts, Castiel thinks, and almost laughs.
“But in this case the by-product becomes a threat to the species’ fitness. If enough environmental pressure is put on the species, individuals who lack romantic tendencies will out-reproduce those who are hindered by it.”
He speaks up, his voice dry as the earth here. “Can you conclude that, from mere observation?”
“Not absolutely. You’d need a controlled experiment.”
“Hard to come by. There are always unforeseen variables.”
~~~
“Why am I spared hell?” he asks her. He is teenage Cas in this one again, sitting on the edge of an indoor pool. His hair is too long. He swats it out of his eyes. “I disobeyed. Many times. If they moved me from Purgatory onwards, surely the next destination was hell.”
“I ask myself that. Not that I don’t think I deserve it.”
Teenage Dean dives smoothly into the water. Castiel watches the water roll over him in a smooth wave.
Her voice goes soft, until she sounds almost like a child. “Maybe they know, somehow. That for me, this is worse.”
~~~
Dean went to college in this one. It puzzles Castiel until he realizes in this universe John Winchester died a year after the house fire. Dean and Sam spent a few years in the system before being adopted by an older couple in Wichita. Dean is majoring in mechanical engineering with a minor in American Lit, and he’s fine with his brother going to school hundreds of miles away, and Cas feels acutely that this Dean isn’t his Dean at all. He doesn’t recognize himself in this one either. Too loose, too talkative, too content. He feels wrong in the body he inhabits here, one more attractive and hardier, without Jimmy’s easy movement. It’s not a body meant to be a vessel. Something present in the spirit, though he can’t quite decide what.
~~~
“It’s all side effects. Like evolution. You have adaptations and by-products.” The woman has followed him into The Scene. Castiel sits down, and she stands behind the flimsy chair. They both stare at the Dean across from them. The game on the table is I Wish I Hated You, a multi-player odyssey.
“All this is the by-product. Someone’s adapting, evolving their olfactory nerves, and we’re the blue irises. No reason for it at all,” she says.
“I don’t know that I want to be the reason.” Castiel says.
The woman walks around until she’s inches from Dean’s face. He doesn’t react to her. Her eyes are unfocused, as if she’s seeing something else. “I do.”
Castiel looks at her more closely. She looks sad, as much as he can tell. He has never had much cause to read emotions before.
~~~
The next heaven is different, again. It feels like a dream Castiel might have had once. Still not a memory, but something that feels familiar.
He’s sitting on Bobby’s porch and Dean is there, too, and it’s morning.
“The thing they don’t tell you about the sunrise is how much better it looks from earth.”
There is calm here, and the kind of peace Castiel has never known but often imagined.
Dean swigs from his coffee and nods. “Yeah.”
Castiel smiles at him fondly. “And then you’d say something I don’t understand.”
“What happens after that?” Dean asks. Castiel leans in close and Dean leans in to meet him, their faces inches apart.
“I don’t know what it would feel like,” Castiel admits.
“But you’ve thought about it. Imagined it.”
“Humans put too much stock in the feelings of their bodies.” Castiel says. His body is currently flooded with adrenaline, his heart beating too fast.
“And you’d like to know what that’s like.” Dean licks his lips and flicks his eyes down Castiel’s face. “You’d like to know just what it is that could make us all so stupid.”
“You think it’s a weakness too,” Castiel breathes.
“But I’d never admit it.”
When their lips meet, Castiel loses the porch and the sunset and the dream-world. There are many worlds he could imagine, but this one he can’t follow.
~~~
“Sam will get Dean out,” he tells her confidently. “He’ll find a way. Maybe it’ll take a few years, but he will.”
The woman throws a rock off the bridge. She leans over to watch it fall. “Who’s gonna get you out?”
Castiel looks over the edge at the distant water. All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men. “I was never meant to be out in the first place.”
~~~
In some they have children, one or many, adopted or natural. In some Castiel even looks like a father. Dean, of course, is instinctively paternal. Castiel supposes the difference comes from growing up human, of having a linear life. Castiel was never a child, will never be an old man.
Except perhaps he will.
He does not know what he would do with the choice, were he given it. He has not had many choices. He does not feel comfortable with them.
~~~
“Her name was Lourdes. My charge.”
They’re walking along a two-lane highway, the kind Castiel has ridden along many times in the backseat of the Impala. On either side of them are low fields of soybeans. An irrigation rig sputters out a mist of water in the early morning light.
“She’s been dead for years. Lived 80 of them. I watched. It’s my fault, that you don’t get to watch him. I reacted badly. They’re not going to let anyone watch now.”
Castiel walks straight down the yellow lines, watching as the dashes change from one side to the other, as they solidify into a solid line over the crest of a hill.
“So we just get these dream-worlds. Maybe they’re other universes. Maybe they’re dreams. Imaginings. Memories from someone else’s life. Of course we don’t get a heaven like the humans do.”
“What are your greatest memories? The ones you’d live over and over?” he asks her.
She grins. “The one where we brought down an army of demons in San Antonio with nothing but holy water and our own voices.”
Castiel can smell the asphalt, only a few days old. “When I was awake in the car, only he thought I wasn’t because my eyes were still closed. And he looked at me. Just looked at me. And it all came over me—him calling me Cas, trying to buy me clothes, wanting me to joke and smile and react. He wanted to know me. Nobody has ever wanted to know me. There’s never been a ‘me’ to be known.”
She looks away. “Free will is all about the choices. We make the wrong choices, it’s our fault for not being stronger. But if we make the right ones, doesn’t that mean that we don’t need God at all?”
“God gives us the choices. He gives us everything,” Castiel says. In a few miles there will be a crossroads, a fill-up station, a road sign with only numbers.
“If He gives us our minds, our thoughts, our circumstances, than He already knows how we’re going to choose. If He knows the future, it’s not a choice at all. It’s an inevitability.”
“What if He doesn’t know the future?”
“Then He’s not God.”
“Intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory truths at once.”
“Faith is the ability to believe a lie when the only one telling it is yourself.”
~~~
Castiel is in his scrubs again. The card table, the frigid room, the board game, it’s all the same. Except it’s not. The game box is blank. No pictures, no words, nothing but colored squares on the board in front of him. Dean is meeting his eyes, staring at him with something not anger, not sadness in his face.
“How did we get here?” Dean asks.
Castiel considers all the answers he could give. Instead, he stands up from his chair and grabs Dean’s hand.
“Run!” he yells, and for a few seconds Dean is following Castiel, his hand is warm and the doors are just ahead, and Castiel is still smiling as the scene collapses around them.
~~~
They’re inside an old Mexican restaurant. The walls are covered in tacky decorations. The woman takes a sombrero off the wall and sets it carefully on Castiel’s head.
“I always wondered—Is she special to me because I’m special to her? Do I love her because she sees me?”
Castiel can make the dreams collapse now, if he wants to. He hadn’t realized how much he missed having any kind of power.
“If you were a ghost, and only one person could see you, you’d fall for them.”
“Would that be the by-product? Or would that be the adaptation?”
They look at each other, and then they’re running at the wall. It’s only for a minute, but the reality dissolving around him makes him feel like he could fly again.
~~~
He likes this one. The Dean here is one he recognizes, if not the very same he knows. He finds he doesn’t want to know, just want to press himself into this man, see if he could fit. If he’s allowed. Please, yes, god, Dean says beneath him. Castiel likes the way Dean reacts to this body. He supposes this is what humans feel when they succumb to vanity. He feels strange when he thinks of Jimmy using it for other lives, as if it was meant for any other purpose than this. It is unjust of him. Jimmy has sacrificed so much, deserves so much better than Castiel’s shoddy guardianship of his flesh. What you do to me, Dean murmurs, and Castiel is finally starting to get what he means.
~~~
He wants. Castiel wants, and it isn’t something he’s prepared for.
~~~
“What do you think he’s doing down there?” she asks Castiel.
“Many of the monsters he’s killed will be down there. He feels guilty about some of them. He won’t admit it, but he does. Emma. Lenore.”
“He should feel guilty about the monsters he’s created.”
Castiel frowns at her and tilts his head. “This is not his fault.”
“He’ll think it is.”
Castiel knows she’s right. Part of him wants to agree with the hypothetical Dean. From the moment I laid my hands on you in hell. Whoever’s at fault, Castiel isn’t sorry. The board game is wrong. He’s many things, but he’s not sorry.
“What are you? You’re not an angel anymore. You’re not human. You’re a parasite in someone else’s body. You kill to stay alive. To protect the ones you love.”
“And this makes me monstrous?”
“Don’t you feel it? Crawling beneath the skin that isn’t yours? You want. And you’re beginning to forget why you shouldn’t. You’re losing your goodness, Castiel.”
It’s the first time she’s said his name. He takes a moment to look at her face, so full of what he thinks is empathy. You would do the same, he tells her in his head. He’s not sure it’s true.
He uses the sigil he’s carved on his hand to press her down on the floor. She gasps, eyes starting to white out.
“It was never mine.”
He feels her power flare inside of him, feels once again like something of his old self. It won’t last, he knows. Her vessel, crumpled awkwardly, is still breathing. He supposes she will lie there, empty, until her body dries up from thirst or her lungs forget to inflate themselves. He cannot spare the time or power to give her a dignified death.
~~~
A vampire is at Dean’s throat. He is bloody, beaten, his legs hanging at unnatural angles. Castiel, with the last of his stolen power, transports them both to a forest somewhere. A river is nearby, slow-moving and muddy. Castiel does not know if this is the right world, if this is another heaven. But he knows this is his Dean, feels it as he feels his own breath in his body.
“Cas.” Dean’s voice is ragged, barely above a whisper.
“You are my goodness,” Castiel says, a prayer against Dean’s chest.