You've been raised in limitation,
But that glove never fit quite right.
The time has passed for hand-me-downs,
Choose anew, please evolve,
Take flight
What are you waiting for?
-Incubus, "A Certain Shade of Green"
A Certain Shade of Green
AN: I owe a hearty slice of pie to everyone and anyone who has ever Followed or Favorited my stories. This is for my best friend, (which, even I know, is a complete understatement) whose milestone birthday is rapidly approaching. It's not fun, growing up. That's why we write. Happy birthday Eve!
Splayed across the galaxy in vibrant hues were the colors of mortality. Red for every soul fighting an absent cause, hemorrhaging like a beacon would light into an obscure ocean. Copper for the scads of currency endowed into an indefinite, perpetual succession that never concludes. And, the brightest of all, yellow, for the stagnant hope sleeping in the hearts a forthcoming generation.
These colors, however, were merely the garlands of the sunset that Castiel was watching with waning curiosity. The colors he was countersigning were part of a warm assemblage. There were hundreds upon thousands of pigments that were omitted from the group. But there was one particularly that he spent the most time fantasizing about: green. Green held a special place in his memory. Not because it was the emblem of nature, but because it was the emblem of his desire.
Dean Winchester's eyes held the fluencies of the world that he knew, the world that he was currently watching from a bird's eye view (because even as an angel, Earth was a rarefied stone in a galaxy comprised of rocks). He could see—anyone would either have to be doused in ignorance or blind not to—the remnants of those he once loved, speckled like sawdust around his irises. These were the fragments of the physical and analytical wars that spiraled into a deep, indefinite succession of pain. His eyes held not only emerald, but the promise of hope in yellow granite-like slivers, not too visible, but not lost amid the myriad poverties he had suffered. It was in these eyes, and only these eyes, that Castiel had been able to delineate the true visage of humanity: strength with an interminable potency to take down a thousand seething suns.
Desire; he surprised his own intellect when he came across that word. Desire was a multifaceted emotion. One commonality among all types of desire was that it was always acted upon like a spirit consuming its host: the more that the spirit imbibed in the human-force sustenance, the less intelligible the host became. This desire, this coveting inside of him, was similar to that. Whenever Castiel was around the human, he couldn't form a coherent thought. It was almost as if he imbibed his own words, and melancholy crept over him like the waves lapping over the ocean that he sat upon.
As much as it pained him that he didn't act on his desires, it pained him even more to believe that Dean wouldn't want the same. Dean was his best friend, and Castiel was the same to him. But comfort would only stretch so far until he exchanged it with someone else, more preferably a female vessel—which Castiel presumes is because he never had the occasion to find it within his own mother. Perhaps, yes, he could leave Jimmy Novak behind in pursuit of a vessel more pleasing to the hunter's eye, but not only would he be deceiving the man who he had made a vow to protect his family, but Dean as well. Dean has always acknowledged him as the "holy tax accountant" that he was riding. If he displaced his vessel, Dean would know—or wouldn't know and then he would have involuntarily copulated with the angel and Castiel couldn't bear the thought of blind-siding Dean like that. But he also couldn't bear the thought of being second-rate in Dean's beautiful, friable eyes.
He wanted to do these things—he realized on a night similar to this when his gamut of thoughts wouldn't pass through the barrier in which they had come—because he wanted to expose himself to the hunter. Although it wouldn't ever be his true countenance, it would be everything that he could possibly have to give his embryonic soul away. He not only wanted to feel Dean's fixation on his totality, but also to take in Dean's as well. He wanted to feel every crest, know every curvature that he had pulled from damnation in the palms of his calloused hands. He wanted Dean's lips to converse through his, feel his tongue materializing the words just as quickly as they disintegrated on his tongue. He wanted the proximity of their bodies to never be close enough, to always feel the need to be closer with every touch, every breath, and every sound that Dean made as he asphyxiated him in this so-called desire.
Desire was wicked. Desire was ruthless. Desire was gluttony in disguise, but he wouldn't sojourn until he and his desires have been pacified.
Only, little did Castiel know that it would never be enough. Once he was inside Dean Winchester, there was no amount of hope large enough that could pull him from the fire that would consume him indefinitely.
