Work Text:
It comes in a dream.
Pure, divine, clear; moonlight burning away the sinister, doubtful shapes in a forest of faithlessness.
It plucks at his muscles and calls him by name. He can feel the Holy Spirit buzzing through him, electric, depositing miracles after his fingertips and murmuring the tests of piety in his ear.
Some pass a lifetime never knowing a purpose, but Castiel has called him to an honorable duty in the army of God and it fills him with pride. He is chosen: entrusted with a mission from one of God’s own and offered the opportunity to use the free will given him by the Lord for the highest of purposes. His faith is being rewarded. And so he meets the trials one after another.
The most trying of all is Amelia. Amelia – his touchstone, the women created to complete him, the mother of his beautiful Claire – can’t understand. It is a burden he struggles with, but he supposes it wouldn’t be a true test otherwise. Doubt, that insidious invader, is plain in the way her shoulders slump, the way she sighs, the way she nearly always looks as though she’s about to cry. She is mourning the loss of her husband, and he never really finds the words to tell her she’s wrong, to tell her he has only just been found.
The lowest time comes when the floors and beds of their home have been strewn with eggshells and she gives him an ultimatum. No more tip-toeing. It’s then the decision must be made, and he chooses faith. He chooses faith that God holds them in his hands and that she will one day understand their purpose. Giving them up is the most difficult thing he’s ever done (them with their blonde locks and blue eyes that used to hold so much light and luster), but he knows he will see them in the kingdom of Heaven when it is time.
He stares into the night sky and lets himself be filled.
It becomes a nightmare.
Brackish, distorted, deceptive; weak, watery rays that barely reach deep enough to whisper their lies against his skin.
Down he’s pulled into a nether-world of half-felt sensations and second-hand motions, tugged by his ankles ever deeper into an endless underwater twilight of floating senselessness.
He was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Time slips and slides and doesn’t mean a thing, but he’s sure that he’s mostly moved past the shock of being so very wrong indeed about angels, Heaven, and God. All that remains is the bitter anguish and the seething sense of betrayal. He’s drowning in it and it fills his imaginary lungs in burning gasps and gnaws at his nerves in painful chomps.
He’s on the inside of a star now; all form and matter and purpose, and none of the delicate tinsel beauty from afar. No, the inside of a star is an ugly pit of labor and decay. It’s dark and murky, a negative feedback loop that only stops eating once it’s consumed itself completely. Consumed him completely.
There is very little he wouldn’t give for the blackness to close in. The only wish he holds dearer is to see his wife and daughter just once more, bless them with lilacs and honey and kiss their foreheads. It’s the only thought that cuts brighter than his anger and the mockery of the light he once welcomed into him.
Castiel could rot in hell, but Jimmy had already beat him there.