Castiel laughs.
Dean knows he's too late when that first wave of baritone hits his ears. It's all different, Castiel is a god or something, hopped up on souls and clearly screwed in the head, but that was the same laugh.
That hopeless, broken laugh that another Cas in another time had given him. One that had been painfully human, drugged to forget. To stop feeling.
Dean stares at Castiel, wide eyed and wishing he was wrong, but there's that same dead, glazed over expression, eyes that show nothing now because everything had already been lain bare, begging to be seen. The laugh makes Dean shiver, a cold sense of dread welling up in the pit of his stomach.
He had told that other Cas with no future but a bloody end that it would be different. That he would never let his Cas come to that.
He failed.
The circumstances are different, but Cas is the same. Trying to mask hurt with something, anything—drugs, power—trying to keep on living when he only had Dean to live for.
And then it hits him. This Cas doesn't even have him to live for. The other, broken, human Cas had another him, one that even after all that was still on his side, after Dean had made a god damn fucking mess of things, apparently. But this Cas had used his free will to try and stop another apocalypse. And Dean had shunned him, even though Cas's plan had actually worked where that other Dean's plan had not. When other Dean's plan had not worked, Cas still stood by him, drugged to the gills and willing himself to forget, but always beside him, even when other him sent him off to his death.
This Cas now had no one. Dean had pushed and pushed, and now Cas was drugged up on power with no anchor back to sanity.
When the laugh again hit his ears, it squeezes his heart, and Dean has to look away from those lifeless eyes. It sounds worse now, than that human Cas from another time, more broken, more hopeless, more desperate, hanging onto the will to just be by the thinnest of threads.
Even worse, Dean knows he could have stopped it.
A deep sadness fills him for both the Cas that was too human without knowing how to be, and this Cas who tried so hard to help until he was shoved away enough to break. He wants to fix it. He wants to find that Cas with pills in his pocket and show him the joys of being a human that doesn't have to come with an ignored prescription. He wants to take this Cas into his arms like the small, lonely child that he is, let Cas cry on his shoulder, curse him until he feels better, anything to just have his Cas back.
But it's too late now. He failed.
why do I do this to myself? I just wanted Dean to hug Cas, profess his undying love, and for them to get married. But know, my muse is evil. oh well, at least it's out of my head now.
hate it? detest it? desire to dig up it's bones and burn them? do tell!