Fic: This Many
Title: This Many
Words: ~1300
Genre: friendship, character study. Maybe some obscure H/C.
Rating: PG
Characters: Dean, Cas, Jesus.
Pairings: none.
Warnings: existential angst, philosophizing.
Summary: An angel’s education on very small things through friends and whisky.
A/N: I…well actually I have no idea. This nonsense just happened, and I let it.
Many years ago, an angel learned to think about dust.
He was supposed to watch. He was ordered to stand invisible under the desert sun and track the shadow of the Messiah. He who would be the Messiah, for then he was only Yashua. Only a carpenter who was kind to whores and smile often (Yashua had seventy three different smiles). Only another prophet with small miracles in his hands. Only a man. Later his name would father a new religion and people would call him the Son of God. But then he was only Yashua.
Watch. Remember.
It wasn’t dull a task because Yashua was kind and the angel had known love all his existence but never kindness. So he was fascinated. He felt strongly that Yashua was a better man than he an angel. Yashua could make men of cowards with only his words. Yashua could change the world without miracles if he wanted to. And Yashua walked the way Dean Winchester would speak: in a straight line, with his gaze strong and his heart forging ahead.
Even then the angel was judging things through Dean.
One day, as Yashua walked alone, he called out to the angel by name. He spoke the name as he spoke everyone’s name, as that of a friend. It was a moment Castiel would go back to much later, when he learned about memory.
“Castiel! Come talk with me?”
Touched and curious, Castiel unveiled himself and walked beside Yashua, shoulder to shoulder in the sand. Castiel left no footprints but he watched Yashua’s appear with interest and thought of a young boy named Sam who was going to grow up so fast Dean would always be buying him new socks.
Yashua stooped and brought up a handful of fine sand. Tiny grains slipped through the cracks in his fingers.
“Why do you like silence so much?” Yashua asked.
“Because it is easier to hear in silence,” answered Castiel easily. He counted the grains as they fell back to the ground. Yashua’s feet were bare; he’d never head of socks. Castiel would see them in Dean’s soul as one of many symbols representing the duties of a big brother. However, he didn’t know when he would see Dean’s soul, and that was troubling. Most angels of Castiel’s rank could see nearly all of time. But for Castiel there was a very great period, only a few thousand years hence, which was obscured and confusing. He could not organize it properly and he could not bend the fabric to go there.
“What do you listen for?”
“God.”
It was Dean Winchester’s fault. He knew that much. Dean Winchester was fracturing Castiel’s destiny somehow. So Dean became the scale by which other humans were measured.
“Have you heard him yet?”
“No.”
Yashua held out his hand, cupped, full of the glittering parts of the earth. The desert was beautiful in his hand. All things were beautiful in Yashua’s hands.
“How many grains of sand?” he asked softly. Castiel did not understand this aspect of Yashua: the part of him that seemed determined to suffer darkness at needless moments.
“Why do you ask questions you do not wish to know the answers to?”
Yashua was silent for twenty seven seconds, staring at the dust he held. “I will never perform as many miracles, no matter how long I live, as I hold grains of sand in my hand now,” he murmured at last. “I am limited. And because of it, more than these grains will go un-helped. I am powerless against the truth of numbers.” Yashua was hurt and confused. He turned his hand over and let the sand fall.
Castiel counted and saw that Yashua was right; he would never help so many. He would never come close. The world was too wide and the Son of God was only a man.
Yashua looked at the grains that had stuck to his palm in the heat.
“Perhaps this many,” he said sadly.
xxx
“So shall it be in heaven,” Castiel slurs ironically to the countertop and slips peacefully from his barstool with a thump. The desert is gone. Castiel saw it in the whisky. Or maybe the desert was in him and the whisky helped him find it. He is not sure. He is very drunk. And God, wherever God is, is laughing at His poor angel of Thursday. The memory passes away with the cool touch of the floor.
“Whoa!” Dean’s floating face leans over him, his eyebrows are concerned. Dean has many faces like that. Sixty seven, at last count. “Cas, what are you-?”
“I am pretending to be human,” Castiel interrupts. He misses feeling human sometimes, and he certainly misses whisky, when he is in Heaven. His brothers are very stubborn, though he loves them, and if one brother is enough to make Dean want a drink at the end of the day then thousands, having a civil war, are more than enough to make Castiel need one. And he likes the warm singe of whisky. He thinks it is as close to the pain of falling in love that he will ever get.
“You’re pretending to be drunk?” Dean, clearly, is missing the point entirely. The point-the point, is that Castiel is lonely, maybe. The point is that Castiel has messed up a few times and he wants to hear somebody forgive him. The point is that Castiel wishes someone would buy him as many socks as he needs and he knows there is no such person. And also that he doesn’t need any socks.
“No. I am drunk.” He looks up and thinks that Dean sort of has a mother’s eyes.
“Your mojo doesn’t stop that?”
“I am drunk because I have allowed myself to become so.”
“Well, I guess I can get that. How many fingers do you see?” Dean holds his hand in front of his face. Castiel squints, trying to see through the blurring mirage in his mind and holds up his own hand in answer. He struggles to pick out the right number to show to Dean.
“This many,” he says.
“Wrong. C’mon, get up.” Dean is hauling at Castiel’s shoulders, pulling him off the wonderful floor where all the small things looked big.
“Where are we going?”
“Home.”
“We do not have a home.”
“We do tonight, and it has a nice big toilet, where you can rest your angelic head.” The rush of cold air is a distant reality when Dean hauls him gently out the door. Castiel wants to pull in the chill and hold it, balanced, as a counterpoint to the desert inside. The hazy wall prevents it, as it prevents a lot of things. Like inconvenient pain.
“Why would I rest my head on a toilet?”
“Because you don’t want it resting on a pillow when you throw up.”
“Angels do not regurgitate, Dean.”
“Tonight, you are not an angel. Get in the car.”
“I do not wish to.” The car is like time, it takes him places whether he desires to go or not.
“I don’t give a shit, get in anyway.”
“I would like a handful of dust, first.”
Dean stares at him for forty seconds. Then he shakes his head, Castiel catches a whisper of the thought crazy son of a bitch, and walks off the pavement to scoop up a handful of the dry dirt road. He pours this carefully into Castiel’s cupped hands. The dust feels wonderful. Better than new socks, probably, because he asked for this and received it and angels are not supposed to be able to do that.
“Don’t get it on the seat.”
“Thank you, Dean.”
“You’re welcome. Get in the damn car.”
He does. Dean buckles him in while Castiel stares down at his dust in the dim light of the moon. He tries to count the grains.
There are too many to count, he notices happily, and dumps them out the window.