Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sam starts getting slower. It’s not really that noticeable, except to Castiel and Dean, and Dean is in denial about it, which leaves Cas to face his husband’s mortality.

“It’s fine, Cas, really,” Sam assures him. “So I can’t run like I used to. So what?”

Cas counts almost two thousand and fifty eight grey hairs on Sam’s head, but he doesn’t say anything.

Two years later, Sam wrenches his leg and Cas decides that that’s it, they’re done. No more hunting. Sam protests, but when his knee disappears in the swelling he has to agree.

Ten thousand, six hundred and four grey hairs.

Sam starts coughing four years later, and Cas thinks of the Trials and bloody tissues and his vessel’s heart threatens to burst out of his chest. Sam assures him it’s just a cold.

It’s easier to count the brown hairs than the grey now (forty thousand and two of the one, one hundred and eight thousand, nine hundred and twelve of the other).
Three years later, Sam is in the hospital again, decades-old injuries coming back to haunt him. His immune system can’t keep up. There are days when he has trouble getting out of bed. Cas holds him through the worst of the pain and wishes he could do more.

He starts counting the white hairs that stand out like snowflakes on concrete. Twelve thousand, two hundred and thirty six snowflakes against Sam’s steel-grey hair.

Six years later, Sam’s breath rattles in his lungs, and Cas holds him close and promises that he’ll find him, he will. He can navigate Heaven. He’s done it before, and he’ll do it again.

Sam smiles and tucks his head - one hundred and forty-eight thousand, nine hundred and six white hairs - under Cas’s chin, and Cas listens to him breathe, waiting for the moment when the breaths stop.

Chapter Text

Heaven is still being rebuilt. It’s been decades on earth since the angels returned, but time moves differently in Heaven, and Metatron destroyed so much. Cas knows this. He knows how many eternities it will take to be able to navigate his home the way he used to. He also knows that, eventually, he will figure it out.
That doesn’t make this any easier.

Ash shrugs as soon as he sees him appear in the Roadhouse.

“Nothin’ yet, man,” he says by way of greeting, and Cas’s shoulders slump. “Don’ worry, I’ll find him eventually.”

Of course he will. Cas knows that, but he doesn’t want it to be ‘eventually.’ He wants it to be soon.

It was hard enough to find Ash in the first place. He only managed it because the human’s soul was sending out signals like fireworks with all the activity in his own personal Heaven and his constant movement through others. It was hard to pin him down to one location, but once he had Cas was able to find him again fairly easy.
Ash is not the one he wants to find. Sam died twelve earth years ago, and Cas can’t find his Heaven. He has occasionally toyed with the idea of killing Dean, who lives stubbornly on, and following his soul, but he doesn’t think Sam would appreciate it.

He still checks in on Dean and his family occasionally, but most of his time is devoted to helping fix Heaven. He stays to the shadows as much as he can - there’s no point to getting himself killed while trying to help. And when he’s not doing that, he’s looking for Sam’s Heaven. It’s a constant ache in his Grace, Sam’s absence. With all the time he’s spent in Heaven and the strangeness of eternity, the loneliness is that of having searched fruitlessly for centuries, and the grief is still as fresh and raw as it was the day Sam died. He’s losing faith, the one thing he promised Sam he never would.

Until, one day, he gets a sudden flood of messages from Ash, his Grace resounding with the human’s static-y, poorly pronounced Enochian prayers. Directions.

In a span of heartbeats, he’s standing in front of a house he doesn’t recognize, and he’s not

the only one there.

“Sam?”

“Cas!”

Chapter Text

Sam is younger than he ever was when Cas knew him, even in the early days when they were an Angel of the Lord and the Boy with the Demon Blood. In fact, if Cas were to venture a guess, he would say that this is Sam as he was when he and Dean first began hunting together all those years ago. His hair is soft and shorter than the angel remembers. He’s a little bit slimmer, almost lanky. His face is noticeably thinner.

But the way his eyes light up when he sees Cas is the same.
His smile is the same, lighting up all of Heaven.

When he laughs, it sounds the same.

When he runs towards Cas, he moves the same.

When he wraps his arms around Cas, he feels the same.

But when they kiss, it isn’t at all like Cas remembers.

It’s a million times better.