A/N: Vis-a-vis rights and regulations, no, I do not own these characters. This is an old piece, I realize it's not particularly relevant after the events of S7E17, but I wrote it during those long cold months where we all missed him, and I'm finally publishing it. Yay?
"Do you miss him?"
Dean turns his head toward Sam, face bathed in the orange glow of a streetlight as they pass silently through another sleeping town.
"Huh?"
"Cas." Sam clarifies. "Do you ever miss him?"
Dean turns his face back to the road; closes his eyes briefly. Do you miss him?
He thinks of blue. Blue eyes; chips of ice in Castiel's snowy skin, blue glitter and sparks of electricity as they stare into Dean's soul. Blue tie; always tied backwards and upside-down and wrong, still twisted even as Dean takes it and smoothes it, fixes it like he wants to fix himself. Blue water; still and silent with the slate of a winter sky the only thing it will give up. Blue lips, as Cas turns to snow and ice on the lakebed.
He thinks of bone. The strong, elegant line of Cas's jaw where it brushed against Dean's coat collar, and the rough scrape of teeth on his skin, nothing more than bone themselves. Cas's thin, clever fingers as he runs them over every mile and inch of Dean, both gentle and careful, harsh and authoritative as Cas holds every part of him and his fingertips whisper you are mine, you are mine. The knots of his spine and how white Cas looked as the winter sun filtered down on him one morning in a pale, empty hotel room, wearing nothing but a pair of Dean's boxers. Dean had forgotten how to breathe as he watched him, and he feels now as though he is still trying to remember.
He thinks of earth, thinks of how he choked and clawed and fought his way out of that field, completely adrift except for the anchor of a handprint on his shoulder. He thinks of air, of the ghosting feathers and untouchable majesty of Cas's wings that he never got to see more than a glimpse of (and now they're gone and burnt and crystallized at the bottom of that goddamn fucking lake no no no shut up). He thinks of time, and how he always wanted more of it, and faster, and Cas was forever content to sit, on park benches and in backseats as he watched everything with the patience of millennia. He thinks of breath, the existence and the absence of, his harsh gasps as Cas introduced himself to every back road and alleyway of Dean's body, and the silent tickle of air, fresh and clean as the morning, as Cas mouths at Dean's collarbone and he slowly falls asleep.
He thinks of Cas. He thinks of Cas, of Cas alive, of Cas asleep, of Cas alone. Of how that is the past. Cas is gone. The thought is an experiment, a theoretical hypothesis which Dean is not yet sure he wants to accept as a truth. He tries out the taste of it on his tongue, finds it acrid and bitter, like blood and smoke and murky black water. He tests the weight of it on his mind, finds it crushing, the weight of it shocking him as it brings him tumbling to the ground. He opens his eyes, takes a deep breath, tamps it all back down deeper than the lakebed and tries to put it to rest.
He turns back to Sam. Do you miss him? With every fibre of his being, every atom of his soul, every breath and every bone, every inch and every mile, every second of every day, Dean misses Castiel.
"Yeah, sometimes, I guess. I hadn't really thought about it."