Sleeping With Ghosts (part II)
Title:Sleeping With Ghosts
Author: elfladyarwen
Pairings/Characters: Dean/Castiel
Spoilers: 5x04: The End
Word Count: ~7,900
Warnings: Angst, gunplay, dub-con, bottom!Cas, partner betrayal (but not really), canon character death (end!verse)
Rating: NC-17
Previous
When I dragged my way back into consciousness, my head was pounding, my pulse beating a tattoo on the inside of my skull. A myriad of sensations unpleasantly human came to my attention in a rush. I’m sticky and crusted, hands shaking from hours lost without a dose of poison thickening my blood. Tongues of fire licked up the base of my spine and I winced, predicting upright movement would be awkward and slow going for the next day or two. My throat was dry and torn on the inside and I needed to piss. But what I notice then is the lack of chill that normally haunted my bones.
Your solid warmth is at my back. I glanced down to see arms strapped around my chest, holding me in a circle of corded gold. Suddenly, I was not as uncomfortable as I once thought and let myself melt back into this rare embrace. I’d earned it and intended to enjoy it while it lasted. We laid like that on my dirty floor, front to back in tight commas, for an indeterminable length of time, another layer of tension caked on to the stale air we shared. I know all the languages of man and still struggle for words to properly break our egg-shell silence.
“Don’t do that again,” I requested softly as I lovingly draw Enochian wards against evil on your forearms with the pads of my thumbs. I was not sure which of these things upset you, but you tightened your grip around me and began to cry.
You don’t ever bring the gun into our bed again, but I know I wouldn’t have stopped you if you had tried.
“I’m losing myself, Cas,” you told me tearfully.
I agreed, but didn’t have the heart to berate you for it. I knew all too well what you know now. We are, the two of us, lost souls drowning in a vast ocean that can neither be touched nor tamed. I couldn’t think of a way to convey this and deem you unworthy of such sympathies, so I said nothing in a time when silence should have been unacceptable and stroked your hair as you cried yourself hollow.
Afterward, when you’re sober enough to regret nothing but the tears, you threw me your overshirt to wipe the chilled semen from my body without a word, but the way your eyes hid from mine said everything. I cleaned up as best as I could, but I could only use the shirt to wipe away the top veneer. I was soiled to the marrow and I felt it, decaying more each day, a thing become rotten and vile. I scavenged up my papers and rolled myself a large joint and marveled at how pretty the yellow matchlight looked on your nude back. I would have liked to trace it with my fingers, but you’d gotten all you needed from me for now and such a touch was forbidden. I could do no more then lean naked against the nearest wall and smoke, watching as you dressed quickly, putting another layer between us as fast as you could.
You wiped down your gun with the discarded shirt and sat at the poor excuse for a table to load the barrel, which I then realized had been empty from the start.
“Why do you stay here, Cas?” you whispered through my wispy cloud of sick-sweet smoke. “Why do you let me do this shit to you?”
Why have you let yourself become so small and weak -- I heard the real question that served as the foundation for your disgust.
“You want me to,” is the only answer I could give.
Because I didn’t know how to lie to you. Because I was petrified of losing my faith a second time and you were the only God left that I knew. Because I would do anything you asked of me, having lost my own identity so long ago now I couldn’t remember or pinpoint when. I am not what I was, I am no longer anything that lost identity would even recognize. I have become little more then a living, breathing, barely functioning toy for you to break at your whim, you selfish boy, and I can’t help but relish each and every one of your attentions as you snapped me to pieces. They are all precious to me and I cling to them pathetically, replaying them in the middle of the night to remind myself that you are worth more then immortality, divinity, and Heaven itself.
In this fragile truth, I gingerly place everything.
*****
The injustice is not that I am what I am now, fettered so by another's life, but that I remember when it was once otherwise. What cruelty is this? If I committed a crime in that previous life, surely it did not warrant this punishment! Why not leave me memoryless when I was born of disobedience and pride? Take away my own life, merge my soul and existence with another's if you must, but why, what point, what purpose in allowing me to remember?
I cared little for anything but myself and the orders of the God I served before. I did not know him then. I did not care for him. There is no freedom more complete than that.
*****
It was a Friday, cold but brightly lit, when we made a pact never to sleep with another member of the same sex. I remembered this vividly because it is the closest I can recall to feeling complete since I fell. Your jealousy had gotten the better of you after that tall, blond man brushed interested fingertips down my arm. His name escapes me now; you had to kill him a month later. Furiously, you demanded I never touch another man but you. I had laughed, the elation at your anger making me heady and light. You would not have mentioned it if you didn’t care, I taunted, unable to keep from preening under your coveting which, to my desperate ears, sounded like an endearment.
If it’s got a pussy, it’s fair game, you’d said. But no men; you had reached the breaking point in your tolerance of sharing, enraged one too many times at catching the scent of another man on my neck or the fly of my jeans.
I had agreed, ecstatic and so sure this would solidify something between us. This would make things better, even if I wasn’t sure how or why.
It didn’t. It only made things worse.
You stopped seeking me out for your release. You stopped coming to me for strategic advice, for consultation on enemy defenses. You stopped coming to me at all. From lover to stranger in one pact, we made eye contact across the compound now and again, your green eyes a distant, dull shade I dreamed of occasionally. Part of the blame lay with me; I never sought an explanation. I never questioned being ignored. I just made it a game to see if I could sleep with your female conquests before you could, see if I could run a higher tally of partners. I smoked more and forgot I missed you. I shot up even more and forgot who lay beneath me at night. In the rare, trembling moments I was lucid, I hallucinated, your phantom touch crawling over my skin like a bacterium I tried to scrape off. I tore at my hair, trying to physically remove you from the space underneath it. The girls and Chuck understood; with a pitying sigh they were good to slip another dose into my hand and I was grateful for their discretion. They never once reprimanded, they never condemned.
I held to our agreement though. Until he came.
*****
“Did you fuck him?” you ask with a clenched jaw and pained lines marring your forehead that I wanted to smooth beneath my fingers.
“No,” I lie.
Oh! Oh. It’s much easier than I thought it would be. I too, think I’ve more than lost myself at this point.
“You stay away from him. He doesn’t need to know about the shit that goes on between us,” you order me once again, always ordering as if I’m a dog needed to be properly cowed and put to rights.
“As you wish,” I say again, the lie smoother on my tongue this time and tasting a bit like self-respect, because I mean the opposite. I mean to disappoint you. I have every intention of seeing him again and he’s already been sucked into this noxious cyclone between us, whether he wished to be or not. I will see him again and bare my secrets and my body, both of which you no longer seem to have use for. He does, though. And as I am selfish and hungry for any part of you I can get, in any form or timeline, I will suck up all of him I can too.
*****
I am a clever, ancient thing. I know of magic and creation and dark places of the worlds that this boy, shut up in the walls of mankind for all his young life, has never had a waking dream of. If I contrived, and was careful, I might find a way to emancipate myself from him. It may be I'd have to chew off a limb, maim myself irreparably, or die in the attempt, but men -- even men, those frail and hateful creatures - have done as much for physical freedom. How much more would I do for freedom of my half of the shared soul? Freedom from these emotions he despises me for?
Yet I do not. The thought, though it comes to me unbidden now and then, turns my stomach. There is a fine wire snare around my neck and the more I try to assert myself apart from him, the more it tightens. I did not make the snare. It was waiting for me the day I raised him from perdition. I slipped my neck inside -- gradually, inevitably, and happily -- a long time ago.
What is this snare?
Only that I adore him.
*****
Easy.
It would have been so easy to forget you were making plans to kill the Devil -- a secret sacrifice of what was left of us -- while this shining, younger version of you was tangled up in me. He’d protested my advances only long enough for me to crawl up in his lap and mouth. It felt easy, this fucking born of something besides brutality and something closer to love. I would have gone so far to call it love-making, the tender slip-slide in and around my body, his lips never once leaving my flushed skin. I would have called it love-making, an accurate description for the way I cradled his head against against my collarbone as we rocked together, his moans like long-lost prayers to my ears, my name on his lips in the midst of orgasm as filthy-reverent as it used to be on your own.
I would have called it love-making. If only he were you; if only the green of his eyes hadn’t lacked the razor-sharp flint yours have housed for years; if only something wasn’t broken in me. Otherwise it would have been easy.
I steal what delusions I can from him, and assure him that you and he are so very different. I am getting so proficient at lying, but this time it’s not done with the intent to wound. He is so scared, I have not the heart to pick at the cracks already forming in his surface. Instead, I do what I can to solder them shut, knowing the day and hour by heart that they will finally burst wide open and empty him into the poor shell you have become. I tell him this is all preventable, the future is not set in stone. From the way he stares at the ceiling as I smoke my post-coital joint, I don’t think he believes me.
I wait till a shallow sleep takes him before I go to the table and write a letter in the dying candlelight.
I still can not pinpoint why I did it. Perhaps more then anything, I was afraid of being lost to the ages. A celestial, powerful and glorious being reduced down to a tool for a madman, a pawn in a ramshackle army doomed to die in a cold place.
Who will remember me once you are gone tomorrow? I am but an extension of you, and once your memory goes so too do I. Perhaps I wrote that letter in self-preservation. Another five years gained, if nothing else.
For whatever reason, I toked myself silly and scribbled out the only memoir I’ll ever have, on the back of an old advertisement flaunting a miracle cleaner for bloodstains. It was fitting, I chuckled darkly.
I finished and precariously folded it down to pocket-size, hoping the paper sturdy enough for time travel and slipped it into the well-worn jacket of your past self as he slept.
He was never aware of my departure. He would never know of that last kiss. Which was fine because he didn’t belong to me, no matter how easy it was to pretend otherwise. As wonderful as it was, it was a façade, an expired moment of comfort with the ghost of the one I actually wanted. And I was so grateful, Dean -- I might have lost my mind if it wasn’t for sleeping with ghosts and messages in the dark to remind myself that you were there, too. You were still there. You were my reason and my excuse and the brick tied around my ankle.
*****
We don’t fuck the night before we die.
It seems useless, like we’d be trying to drive a point home that doesn’t really need to be made. I have nothing to prove and you don’t have the energy now to dominate something that loves you too much. There are no secrets between us, only a distance that we’ve come to except even though your body lies pressed so close to mine here on this filthy mattress, our limbs in tangles and your breath warm on my face. I feel chilled, my blood too thin and skin too flaky without the bulk of my usual drug cocktail, but I can’t rouse the effort to tear away from your lovely heat and you look too comfortable to be moved.
No words pass from our lips because what else is there to say? There are 19 women in this camp, but on our last night, you choose this bed where I lay. We’ve always communicated best without speech, you and I, and in the depths of your eyes tonight, I can read epics.
They sing to me poetic verses of sorrows long turned to ash, and regrets you’ve never managed to bury. In them, I see apologies and fear and all the beautiful tragedy of a man struggling to write his own destiny. Your eyes speak to me, a language I still, clever as I am, struggle to decipher, spinning bittersweet tales of faded hope and a whole-hearted wish to die with some honor intact.
I smile weakly, so proud of you. I would grant your wish if I could, beloved, and paint your name as ‘hero’ among the stars for all of history to see. If only they could see what I see here in the jaded green light. Heaven might have been more willing to follow the Righteous Man to the ends of the world if they had known how to read you like I do.
You are the first to break eye contact, hours lost to our constant, weighted stare, and I blink, lost. You rest your head, slowly, cautiously, on my breast and I tense, unsure how to handle this uncharacteristic gesture that holds a tenderness foreign to me. You’re trying to tell me something, but I can no longer see your eyes, face buried in my chest as it is, and so am left in confusion, trying to understand the language of your body -- I know it not nearly as well.
*****
This is why I put my faith in him, still, as the world crumbles around my ears and I am tethered down to it and unable to escape. Perhaps I give him too much credit; he is prone to fail me time and again. Yet the idea of losing faith in him is horrifying to me and I do not allow it to creep into my mind.
Flawed, oh! How he is flawed.
And he will fail me again if given the chance, this in my heart I know to be true. But he is mine, and what else can I do but believe, most ardently and fully, that he can save us if he’s again given the chance. I keep no hope for myself; I will be at his side till there is nothing more of me, trapped and half of what I was, but content. I will stay because I choose to do so, stay with him and be whatever he needs me to be.
But if given a second chance, I believe he can learn from his mistakes. I believe he might undo whatever wrong choices have paved the way to this bleak future. He might surrender his arrogance, stubborn pride, all that defines him. He might make amends with a wayward, beloved sibling before a fatal consent is given and the Devil consumes what he was never meant to consume. He might yet find a way to reverse the clock and set right whatever is left to be righted, whatever it is that keeps him fighting.
In this, in him, I once again place all my hope. Perhaps this decision will destroy us, rip me from him and I shall never know what it’s like to live and love the Righteous Man. I risk it, willingly. What else can I do - would I do -- to save him from losing himself?
He is my freedom. And if I lose him, I lose it, losing myself as well.
I write this, a confession and a prayer from a dead man lost in time, and send it back with the hope that he will save us from what we will become.
Save us, Dean. And remember there was once an angel who believed you were - are - worth saving too.
*****
I have enough stolen seconds to think on these things and conclude that I am not angry about this wasted death. I predicted this end long ago and it would be hypocritical of me to rage and wail about it now. I was dead the moment you asked me, in that disgustingly ornate room built by angels, to help you, to rebel for you. I sealed this fate for myself for these five years, each word from your lips having its own drop of blood from my veins. I have time enough to decide that yes, you were worth the end of the world, and I should feel more guilty then I do in admitting this.
These memories and epiphanies sift through me and give me some measure of strength, and Dean, you would be pleased at how I bloodily laugh into the face of the Devil’s minion that is my killer.
He’ll end my feeble life, but he won’t win. For I have known Gods and known inexplicable light and known both grace and soul. I have been a creature of divinity and a creature of dirt. I have seen the rise of civilizations and the persistence of galaxies. I have kissed the Righteous Man’s lips and been thought beautiful to him.
And I die now with my greatest sin being that I have no regrets, save one -- if you have gone this long without hearing the words from my mouth, my own, you can go without hearing them at all. Lucifer can’t touch me. We may die, but he can’t beat us. This wasn’t my destiny, this was my choice -- believe me, believe me when I swear I would do it the same way all over again.
I am Castiel, the last Winchester’s angel. And Lucifer can try his damnedest, but that’s something he can’t diminish or ruin or kill no matter how hard he tries. We have lost this war, but we are not as lost as we seem. Dean - oh Dean, we aren’t lost.
This is my last thought, and it makes me shining and immortal before the coming darkness.
Author: elfladyarwen
Pairings/Characters: Dean/Castiel
Spoilers: 5x04: The End
Word Count: ~7,900
Warnings: Angst, gunplay, dub-con, bottom!Cas, partner betrayal (but not really), canon character death (end!verse)
Rating: NC-17
Previous
When I dragged my way back into consciousness, my head was pounding, my pulse beating a tattoo on the inside of my skull. A myriad of sensations unpleasantly human came to my attention in a rush. I’m sticky and crusted, hands shaking from hours lost without a dose of poison thickening my blood. Tongues of fire licked up the base of my spine and I winced, predicting upright movement would be awkward and slow going for the next day or two. My throat was dry and torn on the inside and I needed to piss. But what I notice then is the lack of chill that normally haunted my bones.
Your solid warmth is at my back. I glanced down to see arms strapped around my chest, holding me in a circle of corded gold. Suddenly, I was not as uncomfortable as I once thought and let myself melt back into this rare embrace. I’d earned it and intended to enjoy it while it lasted. We laid like that on my dirty floor, front to back in tight commas, for an indeterminable length of time, another layer of tension caked on to the stale air we shared. I know all the languages of man and still struggle for words to properly break our egg-shell silence.
“Don’t do that again,” I requested softly as I lovingly draw Enochian wards against evil on your forearms with the pads of my thumbs. I was not sure which of these things upset you, but you tightened your grip around me and began to cry.
You don’t ever bring the gun into our bed again, but I know I wouldn’t have stopped you if you had tried.
“I’m losing myself, Cas,” you told me tearfully.
I agreed, but didn’t have the heart to berate you for it. I knew all too well what you know now. We are, the two of us, lost souls drowning in a vast ocean that can neither be touched nor tamed. I couldn’t think of a way to convey this and deem you unworthy of such sympathies, so I said nothing in a time when silence should have been unacceptable and stroked your hair as you cried yourself hollow.
Afterward, when you’re sober enough to regret nothing but the tears, you threw me your overshirt to wipe the chilled semen from my body without a word, but the way your eyes hid from mine said everything. I cleaned up as best as I could, but I could only use the shirt to wipe away the top veneer. I was soiled to the marrow and I felt it, decaying more each day, a thing become rotten and vile. I scavenged up my papers and rolled myself a large joint and marveled at how pretty the yellow matchlight looked on your nude back. I would have liked to trace it with my fingers, but you’d gotten all you needed from me for now and such a touch was forbidden. I could do no more then lean naked against the nearest wall and smoke, watching as you dressed quickly, putting another layer between us as fast as you could.
You wiped down your gun with the discarded shirt and sat at the poor excuse for a table to load the barrel, which I then realized had been empty from the start.
“Why do you stay here, Cas?” you whispered through my wispy cloud of sick-sweet smoke. “Why do you let me do this shit to you?”
Why have you let yourself become so small and weak -- I heard the real question that served as the foundation for your disgust.
“You want me to,” is the only answer I could give.
Because I didn’t know how to lie to you. Because I was petrified of losing my faith a second time and you were the only God left that I knew. Because I would do anything you asked of me, having lost my own identity so long ago now I couldn’t remember or pinpoint when. I am not what I was, I am no longer anything that lost identity would even recognize. I have become little more then a living, breathing, barely functioning toy for you to break at your whim, you selfish boy, and I can’t help but relish each and every one of your attentions as you snapped me to pieces. They are all precious to me and I cling to them pathetically, replaying them in the middle of the night to remind myself that you are worth more then immortality, divinity, and Heaven itself.
In this fragile truth, I gingerly place everything.
*****
The injustice is not that I am what I am now, fettered so by another's life, but that I remember when it was once otherwise. What cruelty is this? If I committed a crime in that previous life, surely it did not warrant this punishment! Why not leave me memoryless when I was born of disobedience and pride? Take away my own life, merge my soul and existence with another's if you must, but why, what point, what purpose in allowing me to remember?
I cared little for anything but myself and the orders of the God I served before. I did not know him then. I did not care for him. There is no freedom more complete than that.
*****
It was a Friday, cold but brightly lit, when we made a pact never to sleep with another member of the same sex. I remembered this vividly because it is the closest I can recall to feeling complete since I fell. Your jealousy had gotten the better of you after that tall, blond man brushed interested fingertips down my arm. His name escapes me now; you had to kill him a month later. Furiously, you demanded I never touch another man but you. I had laughed, the elation at your anger making me heady and light. You would not have mentioned it if you didn’t care, I taunted, unable to keep from preening under your coveting which, to my desperate ears, sounded like an endearment.
If it’s got a pussy, it’s fair game, you’d said. But no men; you had reached the breaking point in your tolerance of sharing, enraged one too many times at catching the scent of another man on my neck or the fly of my jeans.
I had agreed, ecstatic and so sure this would solidify something between us. This would make things better, even if I wasn’t sure how or why.
It didn’t. It only made things worse.
You stopped seeking me out for your release. You stopped coming to me for strategic advice, for consultation on enemy defenses. You stopped coming to me at all. From lover to stranger in one pact, we made eye contact across the compound now and again, your green eyes a distant, dull shade I dreamed of occasionally. Part of the blame lay with me; I never sought an explanation. I never questioned being ignored. I just made it a game to see if I could sleep with your female conquests before you could, see if I could run a higher tally of partners. I smoked more and forgot I missed you. I shot up even more and forgot who lay beneath me at night. In the rare, trembling moments I was lucid, I hallucinated, your phantom touch crawling over my skin like a bacterium I tried to scrape off. I tore at my hair, trying to physically remove you from the space underneath it. The girls and Chuck understood; with a pitying sigh they were good to slip another dose into my hand and I was grateful for their discretion. They never once reprimanded, they never condemned.
I held to our agreement though. Until he came.
*****
“Did you fuck him?” you ask with a clenched jaw and pained lines marring your forehead that I wanted to smooth beneath my fingers.
“No,” I lie.
Oh! Oh. It’s much easier than I thought it would be. I too, think I’ve more than lost myself at this point.
“You stay away from him. He doesn’t need to know about the shit that goes on between us,” you order me once again, always ordering as if I’m a dog needed to be properly cowed and put to rights.
“As you wish,” I say again, the lie smoother on my tongue this time and tasting a bit like self-respect, because I mean the opposite. I mean to disappoint you. I have every intention of seeing him again and he’s already been sucked into this noxious cyclone between us, whether he wished to be or not. I will see him again and bare my secrets and my body, both of which you no longer seem to have use for. He does, though. And as I am selfish and hungry for any part of you I can get, in any form or timeline, I will suck up all of him I can too.
*****
I am a clever, ancient thing. I know of magic and creation and dark places of the worlds that this boy, shut up in the walls of mankind for all his young life, has never had a waking dream of. If I contrived, and was careful, I might find a way to emancipate myself from him. It may be I'd have to chew off a limb, maim myself irreparably, or die in the attempt, but men -- even men, those frail and hateful creatures - have done as much for physical freedom. How much more would I do for freedom of my half of the shared soul? Freedom from these emotions he despises me for?
Yet I do not. The thought, though it comes to me unbidden now and then, turns my stomach. There is a fine wire snare around my neck and the more I try to assert myself apart from him, the more it tightens. I did not make the snare. It was waiting for me the day I raised him from perdition. I slipped my neck inside -- gradually, inevitably, and happily -- a long time ago.
What is this snare?
Only that I adore him.
*****
Easy.
It would have been so easy to forget you were making plans to kill the Devil -- a secret sacrifice of what was left of us -- while this shining, younger version of you was tangled up in me. He’d protested my advances only long enough for me to crawl up in his lap and mouth. It felt easy, this fucking born of something besides brutality and something closer to love. I would have gone so far to call it love-making, the tender slip-slide in and around my body, his lips never once leaving my flushed skin. I would have called it love-making, an accurate description for the way I cradled his head against against my collarbone as we rocked together, his moans like long-lost prayers to my ears, my name on his lips in the midst of orgasm as filthy-reverent as it used to be on your own.
I would have called it love-making. If only he were you; if only the green of his eyes hadn’t lacked the razor-sharp flint yours have housed for years; if only something wasn’t broken in me. Otherwise it would have been easy.
I steal what delusions I can from him, and assure him that you and he are so very different. I am getting so proficient at lying, but this time it’s not done with the intent to wound. He is so scared, I have not the heart to pick at the cracks already forming in his surface. Instead, I do what I can to solder them shut, knowing the day and hour by heart that they will finally burst wide open and empty him into the poor shell you have become. I tell him this is all preventable, the future is not set in stone. From the way he stares at the ceiling as I smoke my post-coital joint, I don’t think he believes me.
I wait till a shallow sleep takes him before I go to the table and write a letter in the dying candlelight.
I still can not pinpoint why I did it. Perhaps more then anything, I was afraid of being lost to the ages. A celestial, powerful and glorious being reduced down to a tool for a madman, a pawn in a ramshackle army doomed to die in a cold place.
Who will remember me once you are gone tomorrow? I am but an extension of you, and once your memory goes so too do I. Perhaps I wrote that letter in self-preservation. Another five years gained, if nothing else.
For whatever reason, I toked myself silly and scribbled out the only memoir I’ll ever have, on the back of an old advertisement flaunting a miracle cleaner for bloodstains. It was fitting, I chuckled darkly.
I finished and precariously folded it down to pocket-size, hoping the paper sturdy enough for time travel and slipped it into the well-worn jacket of your past self as he slept.
He was never aware of my departure. He would never know of that last kiss. Which was fine because he didn’t belong to me, no matter how easy it was to pretend otherwise. As wonderful as it was, it was a façade, an expired moment of comfort with the ghost of the one I actually wanted. And I was so grateful, Dean -- I might have lost my mind if it wasn’t for sleeping with ghosts and messages in the dark to remind myself that you were there, too. You were still there. You were my reason and my excuse and the brick tied around my ankle.
*****
We don’t fuck the night before we die.
It seems useless, like we’d be trying to drive a point home that doesn’t really need to be made. I have nothing to prove and you don’t have the energy now to dominate something that loves you too much. There are no secrets between us, only a distance that we’ve come to except even though your body lies pressed so close to mine here on this filthy mattress, our limbs in tangles and your breath warm on my face. I feel chilled, my blood too thin and skin too flaky without the bulk of my usual drug cocktail, but I can’t rouse the effort to tear away from your lovely heat and you look too comfortable to be moved.
No words pass from our lips because what else is there to say? There are 19 women in this camp, but on our last night, you choose this bed where I lay. We’ve always communicated best without speech, you and I, and in the depths of your eyes tonight, I can read epics.
They sing to me poetic verses of sorrows long turned to ash, and regrets you’ve never managed to bury. In them, I see apologies and fear and all the beautiful tragedy of a man struggling to write his own destiny. Your eyes speak to me, a language I still, clever as I am, struggle to decipher, spinning bittersweet tales of faded hope and a whole-hearted wish to die with some honor intact.
I smile weakly, so proud of you. I would grant your wish if I could, beloved, and paint your name as ‘hero’ among the stars for all of history to see. If only they could see what I see here in the jaded green light. Heaven might have been more willing to follow the Righteous Man to the ends of the world if they had known how to read you like I do.
You are the first to break eye contact, hours lost to our constant, weighted stare, and I blink, lost. You rest your head, slowly, cautiously, on my breast and I tense, unsure how to handle this uncharacteristic gesture that holds a tenderness foreign to me. You’re trying to tell me something, but I can no longer see your eyes, face buried in my chest as it is, and so am left in confusion, trying to understand the language of your body -- I know it not nearly as well.
*****
This is why I put my faith in him, still, as the world crumbles around my ears and I am tethered down to it and unable to escape. Perhaps I give him too much credit; he is prone to fail me time and again. Yet the idea of losing faith in him is horrifying to me and I do not allow it to creep into my mind.
Flawed, oh! How he is flawed.
And he will fail me again if given the chance, this in my heart I know to be true. But he is mine, and what else can I do but believe, most ardently and fully, that he can save us if he’s again given the chance. I keep no hope for myself; I will be at his side till there is nothing more of me, trapped and half of what I was, but content. I will stay because I choose to do so, stay with him and be whatever he needs me to be.
But if given a second chance, I believe he can learn from his mistakes. I believe he might undo whatever wrong choices have paved the way to this bleak future. He might surrender his arrogance, stubborn pride, all that defines him. He might make amends with a wayward, beloved sibling before a fatal consent is given and the Devil consumes what he was never meant to consume. He might yet find a way to reverse the clock and set right whatever is left to be righted, whatever it is that keeps him fighting.
In this, in him, I once again place all my hope. Perhaps this decision will destroy us, rip me from him and I shall never know what it’s like to live and love the Righteous Man. I risk it, willingly. What else can I do - would I do -- to save him from losing himself?
He is my freedom. And if I lose him, I lose it, losing myself as well.
I write this, a confession and a prayer from a dead man lost in time, and send it back with the hope that he will save us from what we will become.
Save us, Dean. And remember there was once an angel who believed you were - are - worth saving too.
*****
I have enough stolen seconds to think on these things and conclude that I am not angry about this wasted death. I predicted this end long ago and it would be hypocritical of me to rage and wail about it now. I was dead the moment you asked me, in that disgustingly ornate room built by angels, to help you, to rebel for you. I sealed this fate for myself for these five years, each word from your lips having its own drop of blood from my veins. I have time enough to decide that yes, you were worth the end of the world, and I should feel more guilty then I do in admitting this.
These memories and epiphanies sift through me and give me some measure of strength, and Dean, you would be pleased at how I bloodily laugh into the face of the Devil’s minion that is my killer.
He’ll end my feeble life, but he won’t win. For I have known Gods and known inexplicable light and known both grace and soul. I have been a creature of divinity and a creature of dirt. I have seen the rise of civilizations and the persistence of galaxies. I have kissed the Righteous Man’s lips and been thought beautiful to him.
And I die now with my greatest sin being that I have no regrets, save one -- if you have gone this long without hearing the words from my mouth, my own, you can go without hearing them at all. Lucifer can’t touch me. We may die, but he can’t beat us. This wasn’t my destiny, this was my choice -- believe me, believe me when I swear I would do it the same way all over again.
I am Castiel, the last Winchester’s angel. And Lucifer can try his damnedest, but that’s something he can’t diminish or ruin or kill no matter how hard he tries. We have lost this war, but we are not as lost as we seem. Dean - oh Dean, we aren’t lost.
This is my last thought, and it makes me shining and immortal before the coming darkness.