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You’ve never seen a face in your life. Not your own. Not your parents’. Not the strangers brushing past you on the street. Just… color. Emotion bleeds off people in shifting, living hues—auras that curl and flicker like smoke. Joy is warm gold, grief a deep, suffocating blue. Fear trembles in sharp, fractured violet. It’s how you navigate the world. It’s how you survive. It's all you've ever known in your life.
You meet him on a night that smells like rain and iron.
Everyone else in the gas station glows with the usual chaos—irritation, boredom, exhaustion—but then he walks in, and the entire room… stills.
Not physically. Emotionally. Where others are storms, he is, nothing. A hollow. A void so complete it makes your chest tighten.
You turn toward him instinctively, squinting at the absence where a person should be.
“…Hello,” he says.
His voice is steady. Measured. Almost curious.
You swallow. “That’s… unsettling.”
A pause.
“I’ve been told that before.”
—
You see him again. And again. He starts appearing like a pattern you can’t quite break—always quiet, always watching. And always, always that impossible emptiness where feeling should be.
Until one day it changes.
—
You’re sitting on the hood of your car, tracing the faint flicker of your own emotions reflected in the windshield, when he approaches.
“I believe I am… improving,” he says.
You look up. And freeze. Because for the first time, there’s something there. Faint. Barely there. But real. A dim, flickering blue—uncertain and fragile—clinging to him like it doesn’t quite know how to exist yet.
Your breath catches. “…What is that?”
He tilts his head. “What is what?”
“You—there’s—” You slide off the hood, stepping closer without thinking. “You have something now.”
His brow furrows, though you can’t see it—you feel the shift, the slight ripple in that fragile color. “Something?” he echoes.
“Emotion,” you whisper. “You didn’t before.”
Silence stretches between you.
Then, quietly, he says, “I have been learning.”
—
It becomes your thing. You describe what he can’t perceive. “Right now you’re… kind of gray,” you tell him once, pacing slowly around him. “But not empty-gray. More like—like a sky before a storm. Heavy. Thinking too much.”
“I see,” he says. He doesn’t.
Another time, you laugh softly. “That’s new. There’s gold—just a little. You’re… happy.”
“I am not familiar with that sensation,” he admits.
“Yeah,” you murmur. “I figured.”
The problem is, you don’t know what he looks like. Not his eyes. Not his smile. Not the way his expression might soften when he listens to you ramble. You know everyone else by their faces eventually—voices, posture, habits—but him? He’s just that shifting, growing constellation of feeling.
And somehow… That’s worse. It's so much worse to you. Because you’re starting to memorize him in a way that feels too intimate. Too permanent.
—
One night, his colors surge. Violent. Chaotic. A storm of deep reds and fractured blacks that make you stumble back.
“Castiel—?”
“I have made a mistake,” he says, voice tight.
You don’t understand the details—hunters, angels, something gone wrong—but you feel it. The guilt clawing through him, the grief pressing down like a crushing weight.
You step forward anyway. “Hey—hey, look at me.”
“I am.”
“No, I mean—” You hesitate, then laugh weakly. “Okay, bad choice of words.”
A flicker—something softer tries to break through the storm.
You reach out, hands hovering before finally settling against his coat. “I don’t need to see your face,” you say quietly. “I know you.”
The red fractures. The black recedes. And there it is again—that fragile, impossible blue.
“But I do not know you,” he says.
You blink. “What?”
“I cannot see what you feel.”
Your throat tightens. “…Yeah. That’s kind of the point.”
He studies you—or at least, you think he does. “I would like to.”
You shake your head. “Trust me, you don’t.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s messy,” you say with a hollow laugh. “Because half the time I don’t even understand it myself.”
A pause.
Then, softer he says, “I believe I would like to try.”
It hits you then. Hard. Because everyone you’ve ever known has been readable. Predictable. Their emotions laid bare whether they liked it or not. But him? He had been nothing. And now he’s choosing to feel. Choosing to be known.
You step closer again, your voice quieter now. “You’re… blue,” you tell him. “But warmer than before. There’s—there’s gold in it, too.”
“What does that mean?”
You hesitate. Because you’ve seen this color before. You’ve felt it curling in your own chest, impossible and terrifying and inevitable. “…It means you care,” you say finally.
Silence.
“That is… acceptable.”
You huff out a soft laugh. “High praise, Cas.”
Your hand finds his again. And even without a face— Even without eyes or smiles or anything solid to hold onto— You know, with a certainty that settles deep in your bones, exactly how he feels about you.
And maybe… Just maybe, that is enough for you. Yeah, that's enough.