Fierce.
She was fierce. And beautiful. When he had been crazy, he had told her she had "thorny beauty", like a rose. She had scoffed, saying she hated poetry, but he could tell she was secretly flattered.
When Dean and Sam escorted her from the bathroom where she was held captive–dear god, for a year!–he had been shocked at the damage Crowley's goons had done to her, the blood and bruises on her face and body, the straggling hair.
They had also dyed her hair brittle blond, something he didn't really understand. How could that be torture? Perhaps because it was done ito /iher, rather than iby /iher? Crowley did have a genius for knowing what would hurt, or seduce, or simply sink into a human's soul like a fishhook. Demons were still humans, still driven by emotion, though it was usually the darker ones. So doing something to damage her vanity and to take away what humans called "agency" could strike at the depths of her character.
He carefully bathed the festering wound on her wrist, then doused it with antiseptic, and started wrapping it in a soft, clean bandage. They had found her a bottle of whiskey, and she took swigs from it while he was working. He wished he could heal her directly, but angels could not heal demons. All he could do was care for her as best he could.
"These wounds have festered," he explained.
She chuckled softly. "Gee, you really do know how to make a girl's nethers quiver."
He looked down at the bandages with a small smile. "I am aware of how to do that, although it usually doesn't involve cleaning wounds." And, yes, he was aware of how to do that. He had never told her outright, but she made his vessel's "nethers quiver" as well, from the time she had gloated about Lucifer's rise, and sneered at him for not being able to smite her, and called him impotent. There had been a moment there where he had been torn between using her to break the holy fire ring to escape Lucifer and simply kissing her fiercely. It had shocked him then–it was something he had never felt as an angel. Being in a human body brought an echo of so many human feelings, physical and emotional. He knew it wasn't as intense as if he were truly human, but the shadow had been enough to startle him to the core.
"Why are you so sweet on me, Clarence?" she asked him.
He glanced up at her from under his eyebrows. "I don't know." He looked back down at the bandaging and smoothed it with a tender touch, running his thumb across her wrist. It just felt right. He smiled down at his work, and added, "I still don't know who Clarence is." She kept calling him that. It had started as a joke, he knew, but over time it had become something she called him with a special caress in her voice. Whoever "Clarence" was, he was glad the nickname amused her.
Later, she said, "When this is all over with, if we survive this, I'm gonna order some pizza and we're gonna move some furniture around. You understand?" She waggled an eyebrow.
"No, I–" He thought about it, about the pizza man kiss, about nethers quivering, and blushed. "Uh. Actually…yes…" He looked her right in the eyes and smiled. It was a promise.
A day later, on a Greyhound bus to nowhere, the Angel Tablet safe in his bag, Cas stared sightlessly out the window, remembering, and wished they could have kept that promise.