1.
It was the cold that bothered him most. He'd wake up bolt upright in the unmade bed, his skin sharp with unease. Winter was coming. He was human.
Dean had bought him warmer clothes–hats and scarves and a sweater with a zipper–but no matter what he wore, the unmistakable slide of cool air across his nerves was ever present.
"You'll like summer better," Dean promised, but he wasn't so sure. Wasn't that the time of blood-sucking bugs, microscopic dangers that fed, and massive, wet storms of hot water and broiling clouds? The time when people roamed hapless in the streets, bored and sticky with heat. As an Angel, he'd found it irritatingly pointless, slow and wasteful as an average lifespan. As a human, he dreaded it. Cold was dead fingers slithering beneath his shirt, scratching hundreds of bloodless wounds inside of him. Heat, then, must feel like Hell on Earth.
So most mornings he would not get up at all. He'd settle back into the claustrophobic comfort of the starched white motel bedsheets, that painful silence now an awful racket in his head, and stare blankly at the unfamiliar closet door until someone called or he fell back into the chasm of dreamless sleep he had become.
2.
It rained one day. He was propped up against the battered brick skin of another faceless motel, chewing on a fingernail. It was a habit picked up from endless, monotonous days of waiting for the Impala to crawl back to it's customary parking space (front and center). It kept him busy as he waited for the Winchesters.
He wore one of the new hats and a blue scarf and to him, the sudden force of thousands upon thousands of minuscule diamonds jittering across the sidewalk was a frighteningly beautiful thing. A torrent of sudden water swept away a crushed beer can. The neon glow from the broken MOTEL sign (no O, no E) was suddenly white-washed and dull.
If rain could be so beautiful, he wondered, why do humans love the sun?
He held a hand out and touched it, felt it curl beneath his powerless fingers. His reflection was blurred and cracked inside the pond gathered in his palm, and he watched blue eyes swim sullenly across the surface of the water.
The Impala came two minutes later.
He crushed his reflection with a flick of his wrist.
3.
"If I was a real human, Dean, would you love me?" He asks it matter-of-factly, leaned up against the kitchenette's coffee-and-nicotine stained Formica. Sam is in the shower, and the sound of the mechanisms in the walls is unnervingly deafening to his ears.
"What kind of question is that, Cas?" Dean laughs. He flicks a look towards the motel door, and scrubs a bit of dried blood from his neck.
But he doesn't answer the question.
4.
They told him he couldn't stay at the motel rooms anymore. He tried to explain that it wasn't the closeness of the walls that got him, not the lack of central heating that bothered him, definitely isn't the sound of strangers doing blasphemous things next door that kills him, but they don't listen. They come home to a flooded carpet, bed sheets twisted and torn, pictures knocked viciously from the walls. He had smashed the TV set, gray glass lodged painfully between his skin and his bones. He knelt among his ruins and was quiet, not knowing how to scream or how to cry. He had never tried before.
Sam wanted him to be safe but Dean just wanted him to shut up. He locked himself in the bathroom and stared at his reflection, that insufferable cold stirring horribly with Dean's shouts from the other room.
Other-him stared blankly back. His hands gripped the edge of the granite counter-top, white powdered toothpaste staining his palm. It smells like bleach and blood in the bathroom, and on the toilet seat the first-aid kit sits reeking with the after-affects of another dead-end demon hunt they insisted he not join them in.
He wished his reflection would have the sense leave this suffocating place. He wanted to reach out, to touch the empty space where his wings used to be. But he knew if he did that, his fingers would simply brush against more broken glass, another reminder of what he is now and what he always had been before.
He sat instead of the edge of the shower, and watched a bloated fly spin drunkenly around the room. Trapped.
He did not unlock the door until Dean had left to drown himself at a local bar, and Sam had retreated to the Impala, worry lining age in his young face.
5.
Dean tells him he thinks he's in love.
He tells Dean that he's starting to die.
6.
He is in suspended animation, euphoric stasis, floating somewhere entirely disconnected to the world he holds gingerly, with a thread. His lungs hold no air and his head holds no thoughts, and he sinks to the pavement outside the Impala and nearly laughs with how familiar it all feels. This bubbling substance coursing through his burning throat is no flight, no return to Heaven, but God does it make him wish it was. He can't see, can't feel the cold eating away at his hands and feet, but he can surely hear the silence that has overtaken his entire being.
And then Sam is with him and the bottle is pried from his frozen fist and–
7.
The headache in the morning reminded him of the day he Fell.
"Cas? Cas, you with me?" Dean had been so afraid, kneeling in the charcoal-colored grass and brushing suddenly icy fingers through his hair. A hand on his shoulder, pressing and anxious. "Cas, you better not be fucking dead."
He was not dead. At least not yet.
Now, he curled underneath the sheets (they are all the same, these borrowed rooms) and pressed his own fingers into his temple, and wished Dean was there beside him again. Whispering. Laughing. Telling him that everything was damned to Hell, but at least he had AC/DC and a beautiful car and a living brother.
And an Angel.
He fell asleep, and this time he dreamed that the world had really ended in a foggy graveyard on a cold day. The entire universe sucking into one cosmic drain. So much blood down a galaxy-sized sink.
8.
"Why? Why's he dying, Sam?"
"Hell if I know. Maybe it's, like, an Angel thing. Maybe Jimmy Novak's dead, and he can't support that all those organs or something. All I know is we should do...I dunno...something, don't you think?"
"He can't."
"What?"
"He can't die, Sammy. I need him here with me."
9.
One month. That's all he has. He coughs up things he never knew lived inside his body, burns fevers higher than the sun and still he feels so painfully alive, so horrifically surviving.
Dean sits on the very edge of the diner seat, fidgeting with the edge of his flannel. It's blue and red, with green accent stripes. He counts them as Dean struggles to find words.
"Look, Cas," Dean begins, pressing his hands nervously into the vinyl chair. "You...you mean a lot to me."
Talking is wasting the oxygen he had once found so preciously pointless. Talking is stabbing his lungs with a fork, a knife, a sharpened feather-point.
He talks anyway.
"And you to me, Dean."
Dean flashes a brief smile. It's strained, and his teeth buckle under the weight of it. The apocalypse has worn ancient looks into the grimace he now wears. Dean reaches across the table. Stops halfway. Starts again.
Those calloused fingers hover before landing on his arm.
"Just wanted to you to know that it's okay. I...well, me and Sam...we're here for you. Always."
He looks away because a man could drown in all that hopeful green.
10.
In the end, it wasn't the cold that he really hated–it was the vulnerability. He thought it might be better with Death–that maybe his fear would ebb like a dark tide, wash away with those last, strange twilight hours.
He was wrong.
"You cold, Castiel?"
Sam smiled sadly, his silhouette lit up by the yellow eyes of the Impala, parked not ten feet away from where they sit, low to the grass.
He nodded, but he waved Sam's offer to get him another jacket away.
"Where is Dean?" Each word is an ice-pick to his skull.
"He's hunting, Cas. I'm sorry," And Sam Winchester did sound sorry–a thick, terrified, human sorry. "I called him, but I think he left his phone somewhere. Want me to try again?"
A breeze. He shivered.
"No, don't"
They wait ten minutes, twenty. His bones are starting to crack and grow brittle, skin tightening pink across his face. Sam seemed to know–he did not smile, did not ask what the matter was in concern. Instead, he reached forward to take his hand, finger enclosing around the thin, icy muscle there. It was the first time they had touched.
"You know, Dean loved you, Cas. He loved you a lot."
A breath. It will be the last one.
"Know that. Love him too."
He had thought, when he was immortal, that Death was a violent thing, all tooth and nail and shredding claws. But all he felt was cool grass beneath his skin and the distant thudthudthudthud of his own heartbeat.
11.
All is silent.
Then–
12.
The last thing he will see is the Impala's headlights, twin spheres of yellowed light, rolling ever farther away into the shroud of night.
It will remind him of reaching elbow-deep into the fires of Hell. It will remind him of a first blinding glimpse of white-light soul, Righteous written in capital letter and his destiny suddenly twisted and turned and broken like a backwards clock.
("Dean Winchester is saved", he will think. "Dean Winchester is saved.")
And then he will think nothing at all.
...
END