THE WOES OF ANGELIC FORTITUDE.
If a tree falls in a forest when there's no one around, does it still make a sound?
It is indisputable that the sound waves are still emitted, certainly. The particles that the tree has affected by falling are still vibrating hard enough to emit them, no matter how nonexistent its audience.
But, in a forest as desolate as Dean, there are no ears against which the sound waves can tumble. There is nobody to accept the sound, and therefore the waves simply dance through empty air for all eternity; particles gradually slowing until their vibrations are not so vigorous as to create sound anymore.
And Dean still loves Castiel; still pouring out affection and hope and desire and longing and desperation from his very being.
Constantly.
But, without a Castiel, by whom the unremitting love of a desperate Dean would forever be embraced and avidly returned, does this love really amount to anything at all? Or does it simply hold existence within Dean's soul; hollow yet poisonous chemical reactions coursing aimlessly through his brain – his predictably human brain that simply cannot register that there is no longer anywhere for this emotion to go. There is no one left for Dean to love.
What is the point of loving a man who does not exist?
What is the point of loving a man who does? Since he will one day cease to do so, as will all the others, and then your love will be lost. And with that thought Dean's affections slow until they do not vibrate enough to emit anything.
What is the point in anything?
There is the sky and there is the top of the world.
They are very different things to very different people, and often equally varying to those who are largely the same. Because even those who have shared so large a fraction of their life with another has not revealed everything. That would defeat the object of human interaction, surely?
It absolutely does so for Angelic interaction, anyway.
Castiel holds the top of the world in his liquid blue gaze, unspeaking and unthinking. No coherent thoughts. Simply flashes and drifting visions of fragmented memory and unfathomable words and dissected portions of affection both given and received and long since longed for.
One evening more and the sky shall return, for Castiel.
One evening more. One twelve hours more, and the inky firmament within which the angel long ago swam shall be back in place above his world on Earth.
Heaven is not the same in Castiel's mind whilst he is no longer with Dean.
Dean, who is still roaming the earth, Castiel is certain; Dean is still out there , polishing guns and over compensating his alcohol intake and his general interactions with pie, and annoying his brother with classic rock songs on the radio of his father's car.
Still wandering through that unanticipated stream of occurrences and positions and interactions – all uncontrollably amalgamated from the beautifully green eyed filter that is Dean Winchester.
And Castiel grins – a very uncommon grin on a face that was not always his. Because there has been so much isolation, and so very long a time to wait.
So much water. Drowning and drowning and falling so very hard for so very long.
All the wings of a fallen angel now need is to be filled with a fallen righteous man.
And now it is over. One evening more...
It is on that evening, though, that Dean's gun takes away his mind. He blasts a bullet the size and shape of one such Castiel through his aching human head-quarters, because those darned chemicals and their crippling after-effects are all he has to blame.
If Dean had never loved him, he never would have died.
If Dean had never loved him, no one would have died.
.For Dean, Cas is all there ever was, and all there ever will be.
Because this was the only man Dean had ever loved, and so this was the only man who could take away Dean's life
And he did, whilst he grinned at the top of the world and waited.