Castiel couldn't remember the first time it had snowed. It was thousands of years ago, in days when the Earth was shiny and new and beautiful and God was as loving a father as any angel could ask for. In those days the snow shown slick and white, covering the ground with a frosty layer of ice. In those days there was no yellow snow, and no sarcastic Dean tossing hastily crafted wads of the stuff at Castiel.
But there was a certain beauty in the filth of the present. A familiarity. A comfort, where previously there had only been dispassionate (and perhaps even a little begrudging) love. Angels have reason to be jealous of humans, after all. So maybe that's why, standing here in this human body, knee-deep in crunchy-dirty snow, still Castiel is happy.
After Dean had bored himself with snowballs, he decided to introduce to Cas the childhood-nostalgia of snow angels. Dean thought it would be funny. So did Sam, perhaps, though he showed it in a different way. But when Castiel looked down at his creation, and then at Sam and Dean's faces, they weren't amused.
"Holy shit, Cas," Dean said, his breath puffing into the cold air. Sam shook his head in silent agreement.
Castiel hadn't bothered to use his arms to create the pitiful appendages that Sam and Dean referred to as the wings of the angel. He knew what angel wings looked like, and they were not blocky and clumsy. They were large and frightening and they were beautiful.
So he had imprinted the shape of his own wings in the snow, and they stretched beside the solemn form of his body. Outlined with flecks of gravel and dirt, a tattered angel stared up from the ground.
"I think I am the best at making snow angels," Castiel said soberly.
