A/N: Hey, all. A little SuperWho between fics.
Transferred from my ao3 account.
The Doctor turned towards Castiel, legs swinging back and forth in the suspended cosmos. He tilted his mouth into a smile. Not the kind of smile he usually gave. This one was sad, unbelievably sad, and ancient.
"Couldn't sleep?" The Doctor asked, not unkindly. Castiel shifted where he stood.
"Angels do not sleep," he answered, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. He did not mention that he was no longer a working Angel. Gears broken, he imagined attempting to explain. Something wrong with the wiring.
"That's rubbish," the Doctor said. "Sleeping's fantastic. I've the best dreams in this old girl," he patted the TARDIS's open door fondly. "Never forget a dream, Castiel. They're like tiny little universes, rotating forever in your memory, spinning on and on and on until one day you wake up and one of them's real."
"I don't quite understand Timelords," Castiel found himself sighing. The Doctor laughed softly, and patted the floor besides him.
"C'mon then, Mr. Angel. Come see the stars."
Castiel sat down tentatively next to the Doctor, feeling his wings stretch subconsciously towards the Timelord's startling soul. It was all colors, that soul. Reds and blues and yellows and oranges, infinite shades, all twisting together. He forced himself, blinking, to look away and into the space outside the TARDIS doors.
It was beautiful. Castiel did not really understand the measures of beauty–he found the strangest things beautiful. The flickering lights of a dim hotel room. The glance Dean gave Sam between jokes. The last words of a righteous human, slipping barely heard from their lips. But the sky from the madman's box was nothing if not beautiful. Breathtakingly beautiful. Vastly beautiful. Terrifyingly, horrifyingly beautiful. He did not care to find what lurked beneath the purple novas, swirling clouds of distant stars, violent and stormy planets caught tight in the stickiness of the darkness around them. He did not want to know what the Doctor had seen there, however beautiful it may have been.
"How old are you, Castiel?" The question jerked him suddenly from his thoughts. He turned to find the Doctor's stare.
"I am as old as the Earth," he said, and fiddled with his trenchcoat sleeve. "Perhaps older. I have watched the human race roll carelessly onto a beach and shed their prehistoric scales."
The Doctor laughed.
"A fish," he said. "I love a fish."
They watched a star die, then suck it's light inward slowly, like it was smoking a cosmic cigarette.
"And you?" Castiel wondered briefly if Timelord's kept any sort of record of age.
"Almost a thousand," the Doctor replied. "I'm a right old man, I am." He smiled at Castiel, then stared back down at his swinging feet. "You and me both, eh?"
"I think I have a few years on you, Doctor," Castiel let out a tiny laugh.
"Ah, well. I can see a lot in a few years."
"Like your planet?" He instantly regretted saying it. Some human programming, probably hammered in by a one Sam Winchester, screamed relentlessly at him that he was pushing cruel buttons. But to Castiel's surprise, the Doctor only nodded.
"It's like standing on the shore before a storm," he said, leaning back. His dark hair was ruffled by an impossible breeze. "You can see the clouds shifting, you can hear the birds go quiet and the ocean lapping against the rocks below you but you just can't look away. Everything is suddenly so dark, but you still can't stop looking, you can never stop looking, even if that final wave is going to crash against your shore and drag you away with it. You can never stop looking."
He paused, and Castiel could see the reflection of space in his pale eyes. After a moment, he laughed. A dark laugh. A heavy laugh. Not his other laugh, carefree and a little bit mad. Castiel wondered which one was fake.
"And that's just brilliant, isn't it, because you're lost before you know it. Oh, you've got your fish friends, you've got your life, you've got a boat, maybe, or a raft. But you'll never see that beautiful storm. You've lost it. It's not coming back. Impossible."
He stopped, still looking at Castiel. Castiel felt suddenly uncomfortable. He'd never been seen like the Doctor saw him. Looked at, yes, glanced at by a hundred thousand human eyes, but not seen. Not since he'd decimated the fields of Heaven, driving blade after blade into the ribcages of his brothers and sisters. He could feel the guilt start to rise in him again, and he swallowed it with a nervous gulp.
"But it's not impossible. Not really. You'd do well to remember that, Castiel," the Doctor looked away, adjusting his bowtie mindlessly. "Nothing is ever lost forever."
And before Castiel could move, the Doctor sprang to his feet, giving the stars outside one last glance.
"Besides," he called, already bounding up towards the console, where a frantic Amy Pond was scolding a smirking Dean Winchester about pushing Rory into the swimming pool again. "You could always just find another storm." He jumped in between the quarreling humans, a dazzling smile already plastered on his face.
And then Castiel was alone with the universe.