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There is a deep scarlet cut in the pale flesh of his forearm. A hit from a stray blade he hadn’t even registered in the chaos. The edges of his torn shirt and coat are rough around the wound, the threads like exposed teeth.
They had been eradicating ghouls. Sam had said there would only be three hiding in the decrepit barn on the outskirts of Biloxi.
Sam had been mistaken.
Castiel leans in closer, tilting his arm, until his eyelashes almost meet the bloody and torn flesh. His flesh, he reminds himself. It feels wrong, the slight heat he can feel coming off the blood.
Stolen flesh should be cold.
He inhales the rusty scent of the blood still trickling sluggishly out of his borrowed body. It smells different to Dean’s, to Sam’s.
Jimmy Novak had a different blood type.
A flash of white and it suddenly hits him that what he’s seeing is bone. The elusive scaffolding hidden beneath sinew and muscle. He knows from Sam and Dean that the bone is supposed to stay beneath the skin, and seeing it means an injury is bad. Were he human, this wound would likely require stitches. Dental floss and cheap spirits in a hotel room, blood sluiced off with bottled water from the gas station. Hidden beneath clean bandages until it is no longer ugly to look at.
Castiel prods curiously at the wound, trying to open it further so he can get a closer look at the inside of the vessel.
It hurts, but only distantly. The pain registers as low priority on the outer reaches of his consciousness. Something he must fix eventually, to ensure the vessel isn’t damaged in a way that could impede the mission.
Code yellow at best.
If he pulled the skin open all the way, stripped the flimsy flesh from the bone like farmers shuck corn, would he see his own grace buried beneath the vessel’s insides?
The blood begins to flow more quickly, the red a bright poppy field as he pulls aside the tattered skin with slippery fingers. Human flesh is hard to get a grip on, he thinks grimly to himself. There is blood beneath his nails, dark on his cuticles.
His fingers are suddenly yanked away, and he looks up from his bloody arm to see Dean scowling at him.
“Stop picking at that,” Dean says roughly.
There is a bruise blossoming on his cheek, only just beginning to darken to mottled purple and blue. Scratches run through the curve of his right eyebrow.
Cas raises his bloody hand to Dean’s forehead without thinking, Dean’s fingers still hot where they are gripping the undamaged skin of his other arm.
He watches the flesh knit neatly back together; bruises recede until all that remains is smooth skin. His grace flares at the action, sings behind the lungs he has no real use for.
“Heal yourself before you move onto me next time,” Dean tells him, running a gore-splattered hand over his newly healed skin. The blood mingles with the small smear of Jimmy’s blood Cas has accidently left on his forehead and the scents mingle in a confusing fashion.
“It won’t kill me,” Castiel reminds him.
There is still grime on Dean’s forehead, sweat stains on his shirt, and Cas has a sudden wild urge to touch again, to heal and heal and heal, until Dean is unmarked, pristine, untouched by the horrors wrought upon his body by the world.
But he doesn’t, because taking it all away would mean Dean wouldn’t be Dean.
“Blood’s meant to stay inside the body,” Dean says, before clapping him on the shoulder and making his way back over to Sam, who is stacking the bodies to burn them. Later, in the car, Cas will heal him too. He will watch the skin knit back together and he will be glad that he can be useful in this way.
Castiel feels blood trickle down over the slender bones of his wrist, his thumb, before finally dripping onto the dirty floor of the barn.
Cas enjoys the way the breeze feels on his face.
The soft caress of the wind, the way he can feel it running along every strand of hair. How it makes the grass sing, the leaves on the trees rustle together in a rushing crescendo of song humans do not seem to hear.
If he had the time, he would stand right here, beside the freeway with its roaring traffic, for days, just enjoying the different patterns the breeze dances on his face.
“How are you not sweating right now?”
Dean scrubs a sunburned forearm across his flushed face. The shovel with which he is digging keeps slipping in his hands. His white t-shirt is damp and near enough translucent, the hem ridden up to reveal a golden sliver of sweat-soaked skin above his belt.
Castiel wants, suddenly, inexplicably, to run his fingers over that patch of skin.
“I am immune to extreme temperatures,” he says instead.
At times like these, he’s glad. Sweating looks like a nuisance at best.
He is sitting in the overgrown grass a few metres from Dean, knees drawn up to his chest as he watches the proceedings. The blades of grass tickles at his ankles, whispering across his cotton socks.
Dean wanted to dig up the grave by himself.
But Cas stayed behind anyway.
He can feel that it’s warm, vaguely, but not in a way that seems to actually reach him. It’s like there is a burning sun pounding on a window hundreds of feet above him, and by the time the light reaches him it no longer holds any bite.
Jimmy’s body no longer sweats. Nor does it feel hunger or thirst. It doesn’t need to deal with blisters from wearing uncomfortable shoes for days on end, it doesn’t need to use the bathroom. Hair does not grow; he does not need to shave. Anything superfluous has been placed into stasis.
It’s his now, this vessel.
Castiel’s streamlined it into a weapon.
Cas stares at his reflection in the motel window.
Sam and Dean are asleep, the room is dark. He has grown accustomed to the sounds of their sleep, to Dean’s soft snores and Sam’s harsh breathing. Neither brother is a particularly heavy sleeper, so Cas knows to be quiet.
Earlier, at the restaurant, the waitress had called him handsome. Cas hadn’t even realised she was talking to him. He is used to people’s attention skipping over him, he is used to the too-polite smiles when he tries to help with the interrogations.
He knows his people skills are clumsy, and that this makes humans uneasy around him. He sees the way their eyes linger on his features, seeking signs of emotion he cannot properly express. When he walks up to people, he sees the way their eyes hover over his stiffly held arms.
Something about him is usually off-putting to humans, no matter how hard he tries to blend in.
This is why it bothers him.
His reflection stares back at him and all he could think is that his true form wasn’t visible. It is more like looking at a portrait, a painting of someone he vaguely knows.
The person she had called handsome wasn’t him but the body he is borrowing.
Castiel’s true form, could they perceive its vastness and light, would send them all running from him.
Screaming.
“Cas?”
Sam sounds small and scared as a child and Cas glares at him impatiently. His face feels funny and his vision is curiously distorted in a way he hopes isn’t permanent. The whole abandoned hall they’ve just slaughtered a rogue vampire nest in stinks of blood.
“What?”
The single syllable is as prickly and barbed as the fencing outside.
Sam swallows, then gestures to his face and then to something lying on the floor in the shadows a few metres away.
“Do you…”
He takes a few deep breathes, through his nose. Like he’s trying not to throw up.
“Do you need help fixing…that?”
Cas ignores his continuing spluttered stuttering about first aid, walks over to where Sam had been pointing. His footsteps are loud in the stillness around them. He crouches down and picks up the object lying in a pool of gore, mingled with blood and centuries old dust.
It’s only when he brings it up to the light that he realises it’s an eyeball.
A quick feel of his face confirms it’s his. The socket feels naked, wet, and Cas probes the edges curiously. No wonder his vessel had felt wrong. It had been missing a piece.
Cas wants to look into a mirror, to see how his borrowed face looks without one of its key components. If it will look less like the man whose it once was. If he will see more of himself now that his vessel’s appearance has been altered away from the standard.
“Can you fix it?” Sam asks, and Cas notes he looks distinctly grey as he watches Cas feel clumsily around inside his empty eye socket.
“Holy shit, Cas, what the hell happened?”
Dean looks at him with open mouthed horror.
Cas regards their twin expressions of abject horror blankly. He doesn’t know why it disturbs them so much. It’s only an eyeball and they each have two of their own. He wonders if he has once again broken some social rule he hadn’t known about.
“I didn’t notice,” Cas says.
“You didn’t notice someone ripped an eye out of your face?” Dean asks him in disbelief.
Cas shrugs.
It’s not my face, he wants to say. Not really.
And angels use far more senses than humans do. Losing an eye is much less troubling than it would be for them.
“Just put it back,” Sam says quietly. “Please.”
Cas examines the eyeball sitting innocently in his palm curiously. It’s larger than he expected, the shocking blue of the iris marred by the blood and coagulated dirt it’s coated in. Part of him wants to keep it out, to examine it under brighter lights than the narrow windows can provide.
But he knows Sam and Dean will be opposed to his curiosity.
He pushes the squishy orb up against the hollow socket, huffing in annoyance when it snags on the bloodied shreds of eyelid still dangling uselessly around the empty cavity. There is an unpleasant squelching when he finally manages to push the eyeball back into the socket, but his face feels instantly more whole, which is a relief.
Cas allows his grace to wash over him, carefully threads torn capillaries and nerves back together, puts each eyelash back where it belongs. He clears the blood and dirt from the iris, repairs the optic nerve. Skin grows together faster than thought.
It takes him less than a few seconds and a few blinks.
“That’s real freaky, dude,” Dean tells him, giving him a nervous pat on the shoulder.
It is a little unsettling how often Sam and Dean need to eat and drink.
He has grown accustomed to it, in a way, but it still jars him.
They are fragile, humans. Reliant on so much. They need food and water, shelter from the elements. Adequate clothing to keep them warm. Frequent bathroom breaks. Sleep, so much sleep.
Cas watches Dean bite into a burger, ketchup staining his lips and grease gleaming on his fingers. Later, they will have to stop because Dean needs to sleep, at least four hours. In between, they will pause to buy more water to prevent dehydration. They will take bathroom breaks. The whole cycle repeating day after day, an eternally turning hamster wheel.
And all he can see is that this is time gone, wasted on simply staying alive.
“I think you’re a size medium,” Dean tells him.
They’re making their way through a thrift store on the outskirts of Burlington. The space is large, tinny pop music leaks from the speakers mounted on the walls. It smells like sweat and cheap air freshener and there are long racks of assorted clothing stretching in every direction.
Cas nods vaguely in assent, runs his fingers along the tops of the hangers. The array of colours is dizzying but he enjoys the way the different fabrics feel under the sensitive pads of his fingers.
They come to a halt by a rack of men’s shirts and Dean turns to him.
“Anything you like wearing?”
It’s a simple enough question but Cas finds he doesn’t exactly have an answer. Likes and dislikes don’t really factor into it. Clothes are a necessity for blending in. His wardrobe isn’t really a priority in his day-to-day existence. It’s why he still wears the same ill-fitting suit Jimmy was wearing the day Cas borrowed his body. Changing it hasn’t really crossed his mind.
Except now they need to be undercover and his wardrobe draws attention.
Too distinct, too recognisable.
Clothes a man went missing in.
He looks at Dean, at the soft flannel and grey t-shirt faded from wear. The practical leather boots with scuff marks and the slight discoloration at the toes of the left one. The same jeans he seems to own multiple pairs of.
“Maybe some flannel?” he asks.
Dean shrugs and begins flipping through the hangers, whistling cheerfully to himself. Cas runs his fingers over the collar of one of the shirts. It’s less stiff than the one on the shirt he is wearing. He watches a man on the other end of the aisle add a t-shirt to his basket and wonders how he knows what he likes to wear, what factors influence his choices.
A few minutes and silent pondering later, Cas has an armful of hangers containing not just several flannel shirts but also jeans and a few jumpers. The selections are Dean’s; Cas having followed him around the racks like a lost sheep.
“Alright, you try those on and then we’ll get anything that fits,” Dean says.
Cas hesitates, uncertain, then awkwardly places the pile of clothes down on the floor. He starts shrugging off his coat.
“Woah, not here,” Dean says quickly, yanking the coat back up onto his shoulders. “There’s changing rooms over there.”
“Alright,” Cas says, picking up the clothes and taking them with him in the direction Dean had pointed him in.
Cas pauses in front of one of the changing rooms, then opens the door. Inside is a low stool and a mirror, an uneven line of hooks on the wall. Cas dumps the clothes onto the stool and examines them a little helplessly.
“Just try things on, put everything you want to keep into one pile, stuff you don’t in another,” Dean says from behind him, closing the door with a click. Like it’s an easy process that doesn’t require further explanation.
Cas looks up from the clothes and suddenly he’s looking at himself.
He doesn’t spend a great deal of time staring at his reflection.
Staring back at him is a middle-aged man. He has hunched over posture and hands with nails trimmed ergonomically short. His dark hair is messy on top, some strands longer than others and he wears it short. His eyes are shockingly blue.
Castiel leans in closer, examining the lines around his eyes, the curve of his upper lip. The rough stubble along his jaw.
That’s me, he thinks to himself. That’s what people see when they think of me. When Dean prays to me, this is what he prays to.
He wears a size medium, according to Dean. He is male. White. Average height and average weight. These are the categories humans place him in when they see him. These are the boxes he checks.
Cas traces a hand across his lined forehead, watches the figure in the mirror do the same.
Over the centuries he’s worn many faces while on earth. Male, female, non-human.
Jimmy Novak is simply another vessel in a long line of them.
But simultaneously, this is different. Like the suit the vessel came in, he’s inhabited this body enough that he finds himself uncomfortable and anxious at the thought of changing it again.
He looks into the eyes that stare back at him and tries to find himself in the external image.
No matter how closely he looks, all he can see is how he would look to onlookers, to passerbys, to the Winchesters.
Because of him, Jimmy has stopped ageing. He no longer changes in the minute, subtle way humans do over the course of their lifetimes.
Castiel finds it strange to think that the body he is commandeering once looked very different. It was once a baby, helpless and almost blind, swaddled in blankets and unable to eat solids. Then it was a child, grew taller and broader, developed a sense of identity. Then it grew up and changed and became what it was the night Jimmy said yes.
Now it has stagnated, his vessel. It is no longer prey to the whims of time, no longer subject to the effects of ageing.
Jimmy’s daughter will grow older, mature, and if she ever sees her father again, he will look the same way he did the day he walked out of her life. Not a day older, not a grey hair on his head. If enough time passes, there will be a time when they look the same age on the outside despite the difference in years.
Castiel tries not to think about how he has robbed Jimmy of the chance to grow old.
Each human fingerprint is unique to them, he learns. No two are the same. That is why humans use them on their passports, in their databases, in their forms of identification.
But Jimmy’s fingerprints have belonged to two.
First to himself.
And then to Castiel.
There is something running down his face, and Cas doesn’t recognise it.
He brings a hand to his face, and his fingers come back wet.
The light from a nearby streetlight plays over the silvery droplet on his fingertip and, for reasons he can’t place, he places the finger against his lips.
Salt.
Like the oceans surrounding the continent he is on, like the spray that had stung a thousand faces, driven those who drank it out of desperation to madness. Like the foods Dean favours, like the sweat on foreheads of generation of workers, like the earth’s crust beneath their feet.
He wonders when the last time Jimmy Novak cried was.
Before Castiel took his life, his eyes, his emotional responses, the way his gums are visible when he laughs and his hair refuses to lie flat.
His faith.
Before Castiel cried tears using borrowed tear ducts, tasted salt with a borrowed tongue.
Except it increasingly doesn’t feel like borrowing. Because borrowing suggests a short period of time and it’s been years. Because borrowing suggests an intent to return.
It no longer feels like that.
It feels like theft.