He had lost everything that had ever made him feel worth anything. The world around him had fallen into destruction, rested on the very brink of the total, apocalyptic oblivion. Whatever Grace Heaven had granted him was nearly gone, dwindled until he was the very shell of the magnificent creature he knew he was meant to be. Less than that. He was the dried-up husk of an angel, trapped inside the shell of a man who had been literally torn apart and put back together enough times, his soul looked like spaghetti.
Cas knew there could be no going back this time. He'd abandoned all hope. This was the End. If he died now, it would be permanent, and part of him relished the thought of finally owning up for his failures and his betrayals, but mostly because he had lost faith, even in the man for whom he got up in the morning.
Thinking like that, Cas shook himself. Stupid, stupid angel. Of course, he hadn't lost faith. It was the only thing he never seemed capable of diverging himself from. Faith. Certainly, he'd lost faith in his own Father long ago and in his brothers and sisters well before that, but somehow he could never shake his faith in humanity. Well no, not humanity. Just the one man.
Faith isn't enough to sustain hope, though. He learned that quickly when the world began to fall apart, when the younger brother gave up. Cas saw the last strands of hope break then. In Detroit. With a simple, "yes," he understood – to the very core of his being – despair.
Angels don't despair. They have God and Righteousness and at the very least they have their own Grace to sustain them, but Cas was hardly an Angel of the Lord anymore, could barely think of himself as even Castiel. The only thing he seemed useful for was an providing an unreliable source of gunfire and as a sort of demon-radar.
Where he sat in his own personal cabin, a derisive snort racked his body.
His body. He'd grown so hyper-aware of the damned thing as his power had fallen away. It wasn't even properly his body but that of poor Jimmy Novak. Boy, had he bitten off more than he could chew when he had signed on to be the vessel of that seemingly innocuous angel Castiel. What a damned fool to think that he was being called to something better. He would have seen better days in Hell than he had seen chained to the comet that the angel proved to be, a meteor constantly falling and violently striking the earth, only to be propelled outward again to begin the cycle anew.
But not this time. Earthbound.
He took a drag from the blunt held loosely between two fingers, Jimmy's fingers? – how far he'd fallen – and smirked self-depreciatively. What a fucking mess it was to be human. But with any luck, he could blow it all away, even if only for a little while. He could leave his body and walk in the clouds for a while, fly like he used to, even if only in his mind, aided by some drugs he'd scrounged from who-knows-where. Humans. Such ingenuity.
They were bound to the earth, but they made skyscrapers, and aeroplanes, and helicopters, and space ships, and when they could not physically reach the sky, they had pills that could make them feel just as infinite. Had this been part of his Father's great, ineffable plan?
With dilated pupils, he turned red-rimmed eyes skyward, seeing the stars even through the wooden rafters of his sleeping-place, and a tear rolled unbidden down his cheek – that was new – even as he grinned vacantly in the empty air. He could fly again.